In Janet Frame’s The Edge of the Alphabet,Zoe Bryce says, “I’m just out of the ship’s hospital, and you know how you feel when you’ve been ill and are up again out of bed; as if everything is walking through you without your consent, ignoring your flesh and bones; and you hang, helpless, like a bamboo curtain in the doorway of all events and purposes.”
It’s a vivid, hyperbolic, yet utterly true description of post-illness delirium. In the novel, Zoe is aboard the Matua, sailing from New Zealand to Britain. She is a former schoolteacher from the Midlands, returning home after “a year in the Antipodes, 11,000 miles there and back in search of what most people find in the next room or, closer, in the lining of their skin”. Aboard the ship she meets Toby Withers, a New Zealander who suffers from epilepsy and hopes to start a new life in London, and his cabin mate Pat Keenan, an Irishman returning to Europe after an unsuccessful trip abroad to find a wife.
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