A Book Review Spies by Michael Frayn

Lots going on but difficult to write about in an orderly way. So I'll just hand you over to a book review.

I'm hopeless. This whole Conjuring Sunlight blog is a testimony to my superfical and very limited little life.

Today I've been working on two poems, I'm trying to get my head around the General Election and I've been working on two book reviews. Out there we are trying to move house, buy a car and I'm trying to keep up with a job that at times feels too much for me - even though I'm not doing full hours. Somewhere among all the day to day stress and busyness are my wife and children.

My prayer life is nil. My fairtrade/debt/aid/green concerns have fallen to the ground, let alone my parenting ideals and practice.

It's not because of my legs. My head as always is full of dust. Simply. I do not seem to be able to apply myself.

I feel quite pathetic.

Spies

By Michael Frayn

A good book. Beautifully written at times. It evokes an English suburban childhood during the second world war years. It reminds me of L. P Hartley’s The Go-Between. There are so many parallels Frayn must have used The Go-Between as his starting point.

Two school boys aged somewhere between eleven and thirteen hit upon a new game. Or is it a game? Keith declares one day, his mother is a German spy, and so the two set about watching her every move, at weekends, after school, during the holidays.

But the game becomes serious and has tragic consequences for the main characters in this mystery novel, heavy with nostalgia, raising issues of memory, childhood, loyalty, betrayal and friendship.

Keith’s mother is not a spy but does have a secret and the novel tracks Stephen’s agonizing, cowardly and humiliating search for a truth he eventually discovers and becomes unable to escape from – trapped by a code of honour, his youth and an overwhelming sense of guilt and personal responsibility.

On the brink of adolescence he witnesses and is exposed to a raw, dark and brutal adult world from which he has no defences.

The narrator is Stephen, Keith’s sidekick. Who returns fifty years later to The Close where they lived and played out this little drama.
There are a couple of weaknesses for me.

Firstly the narrator. It is a strong confident voice that unfolds the story to us. For me it is too confident. I can see Michael Frayn ringing his hands with joy, knowing Stephen has a good story to tell. There is just the whiff of self satisfaction in his highly accomplished, glossy prose.

Secondly unlike Leo in The Go-Between Stephen’s life does not seem to have been damaged by his experience. He returns to The Close because of a long forgotten smell and at the end of the novel Stephen says he wants to find a scarf he buried all those years ago.

Whereas Leo’s return to Norfolk many years later represents his hopeless and pathetic search for his life that he has squandered and wasted due to the events that took place there over fifty years ago.

So much of the two England’s are similar. An England bound by strict class codes, inscrutable adults, distant and unapproachable father’s that can barely communicate with their sons. Innocent childhood’s that are wrecked by frustrated adult desire and selfishness.

Well I do seem to have written a lot.