Michael Frayn – Spies

ISBN: 0571212964

One of my greatest delights is to stumble accidentally into a book that transports you into another world: a world where you are fully engaged with the characters and more subtly, where you feel as though you exist alongside them. I did read this book by accident. I lifted it off the shelf of the Pembrokeshire farmhouse where we were enjoying a summer holiday and placed it on my bedside table to read. Weeks later I found it at home; my wife having packed it away with the rest of the pile of unread holiday reading. Months later I threw it in my case at the last minute for a skiing holiday and, because I spent two days in bed with a variant of man flu, I was able to take it at one sitting propped up by pillows and feeling sorry for myself.
Michael Frayn has a gentle genius. Firstly he seduces you into his story, often with feathery tugs at your emotions and senses and then he twists away so that by the end you are not quite sure how you feel and if it was a pleasure or a lament. In the case of Spies Frayn reaches those semi-dark recesses of your mind that contain not only the images of your own childhood but the feelings and the proportions as well. The proportions are particularly telling because as an adult one tends to forget the joy of small distances, the discovery of a den in the bushes on a piece of wasteland near your house, the comfort of the local parade of shops and the strangeness of the houses on the avenue around the corner from your own street. Frayn is sublime in how he creates the childhood state of wonder at the world and also the blank page that is a child’s understanding of the adult world.
Gradually though the delight in finding oneself transported back to childhood, especially in such a superficially innocent time as England in the 1940’s where much of life is on hold “for the duration” , is supplanted by a more sinister and ultimately deeply saddening insight into real adult lives as a tragic set of relationships unfold.
The novel closes with a return to the current day, with a small denouement on how some of the lives may have played out but really, through subtle probing and a masked reality, you realise that the most significant moments of the characters lives happened in the course of the novel in a very private and reserved English way.
As I read the first few chapters I was going to pass the book to my father to read, as he would have been exactly the same age as the boys in the story during the war, but, as the nature of the novel changed I thought perhaps not, or at least not for the reasons of nostalgia I imagined. I’ll have to pass it on now just as a novel of the highest quality.

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