Bainbridge’s later novels, more historical and variable, often deal with the puzzled
frustration with which the young experience the world.Michael Frayn
Michael Frayn(1933– ), acclaimed at Cambridge as a writer of comic sketches,
soon achieved commercial and critical success both as a playwright (with his farce,
Noises Off, and the moral-problem playCopenhagen) and also as a novelist, a rare
double. His fiction, written later, has become less comic:Spies, 2002, goes ‘down
memory lane, before it turns into amnesia avenue’. It returns to the painful experi-
ences of immaturity, a theme also of Waugh’sBrideshead Revisited,of L. P. Hartley’s
The Go-Between,and Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending.
Stephen Wheatley revisits the suburban Close where, fifty years earlier, a timid
and insecure boy who did not feel close to his parents, he had played wartime
games with his friend Keith. Keith’s monosyllabic dad stays at home, wearing his
First World War bayonet on his belt and working constantly on the family car,
keeping it in perfect order. Stephen’s father is absent, working away from home.
The boys hide in a ‘den’ in some bushes, spying on all that goes on in the Close.
Observing that Keith’s mum regularly takes groceries to a place which they cannot
find, eluding them when they try to follow her, the boys conclude that she is a
German spy. In fact Keith’s mum is secretly feeding Uncle Peter, an RAF bomber
pilot and therefore a hero; but Peter has now become a demoralized deserter. He
too has a den: a hole underground in which he hides. The boys interpret the lives
of the adults around them, entirely missing the ‘relationships’ aspect, the chief
interest of the girls who live in the Close. All this is deftly handled, as is the effect
on Stephen of the poise and elegance of Keith’s mum. Stephen Wheatley later finds
out that his father is a Jewish refugee and that his name was Stefan Weitzman....
Frayn,a keen caricaturist of suburban middle-class lives, a Home Counties Alan
Ayckbourn, here addresses the effects and aftershocks of war.Spiesis engaging,
clever,skilful,effective; an advance on Headlong (1999).But there is an imper fect
match between the author’s gifts, which are for lightness, and the grave themes he
pursues here.
Our ability to believe, or make-believe, is what fiction works on. A sympathetic
kind of narratorial trick is found in James Hamilton-Paterson’s Gerontius,which
won the Whitbread prize for fiction in 1989; Gerontius means old man. The author
recreates in detail a voyage taken in 1923 by the composer Sir Edward Elgar, then
aged 66, across the Atlantic and up the Amazon to Manaos; where he finds an old
flame,now an archivist at a German institute, who is also an expert on his music and
on his past life. (The Dream of Gerontius was Elgar’s first major work, an oratorio
adapting a poem by John Henry Newman, on the dying thoughts and experiences of
an old man,and on what follows his death.) It is eventually revealed that the
emotional and grumpily defensive Great Victorian has misunderstood much of what
he sees, and so has the reader. Early in the novel an unrelated episode of magical real-
ism devoted to St Simeon Stylites, a pillar-hermit of the Syrian desert in the fifth
century, is introduced without explanation. The cult, isolation and elevation of this
venerated figure have turned him into a charlatan as well as a saint. Implicitly, the
suggestion is that celebrity has done the same to a great composer whose best work
is behind him, and who misreads things as completely as those who celebrate him.
It is a clever, well-written and accomplished novel, but substantial fiction has not
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