Spies

Frayn took a simplistic wartime storyline and made it unfold for the reader like a film. The characterization comes alive with the needling of going through the visage between childhood and adulthood, and innocence and wisdom. There's a yearning at the core of the story with an ending as if it were a short story, with a meaningful return to present reflections. It is a pretty good read!

Michael Frayn's "Spies", the 2002 Whitbread Prize winner, is a quintessentially English novel that recalls L P Hartley's classic "The Go Between". Both novels begin with an old man indulging in the queasily pleasurable habit of visiting the past when as a young boy he was innocent of the tragedy his childish detective games would set in motion for the adults and end with a stark recognition that resonates with an indescribable pain we feel for the ruined lives they have caused. The rush of familiar smells and the recollection of other childish secrets like a misspelled password trigger off a flood of memories for the adult Stephen Wheatley. These in turn become the catalyst for unravelling the secrets that underlie the mystery that consumed the boy Stephen and his playmate Keith one fateful summer.Frayn flits skilfully between past to present but when we enter the world of the boy Stephen, we become child observers too. We don't have a head start in our understanding of what is happening among the adults because our senses are his. Even Keith's mother - like all mothers - doesn't have a name. The suspicious routines that preoccupy Keith's mother - her constant shuttling between home and her sister's or the post office, and her mysterious disappearance from sight every time she turns the corner - is shrouded in a mystery that deepens with vague hints of cruelty and abuse that only the adult Stephen is able to discern. Indeed, the relationship between Stephen and Keith is hardly a friendship, more an emblem of their class differences, which allow the middle class Keith to play leader to the socially inferior Stephen. In the same way, Keith's parents exude a distance and coolness that is slightly unnerving.Frayn's characterisation is flawless. His characters are all vividly drawn personalities that leap out of the pages at you. Stephen's torment and debilitating lack of confidence as a socially underprivileged child is especially resonant and a masterpiece of characterisation. Then there's Keith's mother. Her icy elegance and well groomed exterior conceals the desperate and terrible turmoil beneath it. Keith's father, constantly at work in his home garage, is a lurking and quietly menacing presence. Then there's Keith. His haughty silence and his cruel smirk, duplicating his father's, is a precursor for when he draws blood. Finally, there's Barbara. Her precocious spitefulness makes her every pre-teen boy's nightmare big sister. "Spies" is a delicious psychologically thriller that fans of the English novel will delight in. It is beautifully written and a real page turner. You will find your pulse racing as the story approaches its climax. But Frayn eschews an explicit revelation, so you might have to read the last chapter carefully (if not twice) to get it. Sadly though, he decides to wrap with a contrived shock revelation about Stephen's own family history that is unnecessary and brings the story to an end on a false note. "Spies" is otherwise a

This is a delicious little novel about the abiguities of memory and sentiment. The story centers on the recalled events of the main character's childhood during World War II in England. The character, Stephen Wheatley, is about 10 or 11 years old and definitely a square peg. Stephen's apparently only friend confides that his mother must be a German spy and the two boys begin an adventure of "spying" on her that leads them where they never dreamed. Frayn's pacing is deliberate and precise, and each new revelation in the adventure raises more questions than answers. The novel, however, is mostly about Stephen's growing up, learning about himself, what he is capable of, and what it means to live in the world of adults. It traces a path that many children go through at that age, and I found I had a lot of sympathy for Stephen. An excellent story.

In a marked departure from his previous humorous novel, Headlong, Frayn delivers a wonderful look at the complicated world of a child. During his own childhood (the early years of World War II), Frayn's best friend makes the statement to him, "My mother is a German spy." In writing this novel, Frayn takes this true event and plays the "what if" game. The two friends know that this is just a game, just a means of passing a summer afternoon, but what if they spy on her and start to see actions that might indicate that she truly is a spy? It's a wonderful look at how perplexing the adult world can be to a child, and how wrong our impressions -- either as a child or as an adult -- can be when we don't explore the full picture. Frayn throws a clever curveball at the very end of the book, one which could have been predicted by the careful reader. It's unfortunate that this book has come out at the same time that Ian McEwan's book, Atonement, was issued, since they are somewhat similar in theme (the wide ramifications of a child's actions during World War II), and it may ultimately get lost in the literary shuffle. That's a shame, for reading it on its own is a terrific way to spend a weekend.

A fragrance, a taste, a numinous sense of deja vu--all familiar literary devices that, in a sensual rush, transport a narrator and reader to a lost moment vividly, but narrowly, recalled. In the course of the tale, the recollection expands, through paths at first dimly remembered but, over time, recovered with increasing clarity. Michael Frayn deploys these Proustian materials brilliantly, detailing with quick strokes a lost world of childhood in wartime London, of proto-suburban enclaves that are more like thatch villages than city neighborhoods, where even hidden lives seem transparent, everyone seems to be watching everyone else, and nothing escapes the attention of the village children, those custodians of every local scandal, romance, adventure, and suspicion. The story begins meekly, as a trip down memory lane, and slowly, like a Ravelian Bolero, gains in intensity and pace. One of Spies' most impressive aspects is, in the interplay between narrator and narration, the way in which Frayn withholds from the reader information that the young Stephen could not yet have figured out or understood. This allows the story, despite the older Stephen's omniscient point of view, to unfold naturally and almost perfectly from a child's-eye view, but blended with adult-perspective hindsight to provide texture and depth and, in some instances, additional layers of ambiguity.Spies will appeal strongly to readers of a certain age, who as children in a pre-television era relied on their own resourcefulness and imagination to entertain themselves, who literally assembled their own universes from found materials. Spies is, moreover, one of the very best depictions of a child's groping to make sense of the adult world from within the conspiratorial know-it-all world of childhood. I must confess, however, that I was tempted to dock Frayn a star for the unsatisfying--for me--way in which he handled aspects of the concluding 20-30 pp (it's no spoiler to mention this--plenty of reviews already have). But the sated sense of satisfaction in which I basked as I closed the book precluded anything other than full credit. With economical prose, vivid characterization, and superbly realized WWII fringe-London mise-en-scene, Michael Frayn has added another small gem to his oeuvre, one you will tear through in a sitting, pausing only, I'll warrant, to reflect on your own lost world of childhood.