Rejected Resurrection

YELLOW FLOWERS IN THE ANTIPODEAN ROOM by Janet Frame. 248 pages. Braziller. $5.95.

Writing from the focus of the spiritually down and out, the demented and the dead, New Zealander Janet Frame has developed a tidy literary reputation as a wild necromancer. Yellow Flowers in the Antipodean Room, her seventh novel, offers a typically hard look at life from the dark side.

Godfrey Rainbird, a 30-year-old British-born emigrant to New Zealand, is pronounced dead after a traffic accident. His wife prepares to don widow's weeds, his children begin to adjust as orphans, his sister flies from England for the funeral. A monogrammed casket is purchased, a cemetery plot arranged for, But there is no funeral. Thirty-six hours after his "death," Godfrey rises from a deep coma, a little shaky but quite ready to resume his life.

Life, however, rejects his resurrection. He is fired from his job as a travel clerk ("Who wants their annual holiday booked by a former corpse?"), branded an anathema by society ("As long as Godfrey were to live and work among people,' each one would be faced constantly with the fact of his own death"), and even resented by his family for the inconvenience of his miracle ("We're Before and After people now," laments his wife). His life after death, not surprisingly, becomes a downhill slide: the authorities strip him of his children, his neighbors stone him and his wife commits suicide. Finally, he completes his mortem interruptam.

This could be the stuff of social fable, religious parable, supernatural fantasy or even black comedy. Sadly, it too often emerges as little more than a tepid and distended mood piece. The hero is literally too cold and stiff, the plot too standpattish, the pace too funereal and the symbolism too obvious.

Occasionally, Miss Frame breathes life into her tale of death with her poet's gift of language. Indeed, the best part of the novel is an interlude of exuberant Joycean punning when Godfrey's death-scrambled brain cannot help turning words inside out. For example, he reads "The Drol's Pryer":

"Our afther which rat in heaven; hollowed be thy mane; thy dingkum come; thy will be done on thear as it is in heaven; give us this day our daily dread and frogvie us pour press-stares as we frogview those who press-stare against us."

Had Miss Frame scrambled her characters and their actions with comparable imaginativeness, this would be a much better novel--or, as Godfrey might have put it, a chum berett loven.

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