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PART 3

Michael Frayn

HEADLONG

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down to it you don't have much choice. You just have to work with what God sends, and if God doesn't seem to understand the concept of commercial success than that's your bad luck."

He has, he admits, had his share of turkeys – most painfully Look, Look, an inverted version of Noises Off that looked at audiences instead of actors. "Until we played our first preview everyone thought we had a hit. That day it became quite clear that we in fact had a corpse." But there is more to it than the occasional flop. "I'm always struck, reading reviews, by the fact that sometimes plays are reviewed in the context of other plays, or novels in the context of other novels, but never against each other."

In the work itself, these divisions simply don't exist. His characters inhabit a world of literate physicists and arty philosophers. In Headlong, for instance, as Frayn's would-be art historian ruminates on the likelihood of a missing Brueghel turning up, out pops an allusion to Oscar Wilde's Importance of Being Ernest: "In that case no fewer than seven of the series might have been lost, which by Lady Bracknell's standards might seem like quite egregious carelessness." It's not showy, or particularly important; it is merely a reflection of the urbane universe to which Michael Frayn characters tend to belong.

Although it's true that a Frayn play does not carry the branding of, say, a Stoppard, and that there probably isn't a legion of fans barracking Waterstone's for his latest novel, he has produced a body of work that is beginning to look increasingly impressive and coherent as Faber reprints his backlist and the National Theatre revival of Noises Off introduces new generations of theatregoers to his stage work. And, of course, as he continues to add to the canon.

His latest novel, Spies, is very different from the erudition of Copenhagen or Headlong. It is a slim and piquant novel of childhood, set during the second world war, in which a small boy becomes ensnared in adult deceptions after a game of spying gets out of hand. Stephen is an impressionable child whose make-believe world becomes poisoned by the suggestion, made by his best friend, that this friend's mother is a German spy.

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Although the book took a year to write, the idea had been swirling around in his head for more than 20 years, he says. "I had this idea of writing about that period and trying to capture something about how people see the world and what they believe about it and the stories they tell about it, but I could never decide how to focus it."

Then he remembered an incident from his own childhood, when a friend he looked up to told him he suspected his own mother of being a spy, and there it was. "As far as I know we didn't follow it up, but it started me thinking about how I had felt about it and whether I believed it. Of course, I believed it in a way and not in another way."

There the autobiographical element ends. While Spies would seem to be more personal than his previous novels, Frayn insists it is just as painstakingly researched: "It is just that the research I did was trying to remember what it felt like." This research project is embodied in the novel by the older Stephen, who revisits his childhood home to try to grope his way to an understanding of what went on in the head of the "monochrome" child he was all those years ago. It's one of the unsettling features of the novel that you're never quite sure how much is felt and how much is informed reconstruction.

Most of Frayn's own childhood was spent in the south London suburbs with a father who was a deaf asbestos salesman, who had left school at 14, and a mother who had to give up a promising future as a violinist to become a shop assistant when her family fell on hard times. There is something strangely archetypal about these two little parental vignettes – indeed, John Cleese once said, when asked what made a good humorist, "we're all salesmen's sons".

When the young Michael wasn't cutting up lengths of asbestos guttering, he was putting on puppet plays for local children and observing his father's skill at negotiating a job in which hearing would seem to have been a prerequisite. As Frayn tells the story, without a smile and for what must be the thousandth time, he makes you acutely aware of how heroically comic it is. "I go to great lengths to avoid farce happening to me, but I find it happens of its own accord," he has said. "That's why farce is funny on stage."

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Not so funny was the "hideous" local private school he was sent to as a small boy, or the death of his mother when he was 12. Unable to afford both a housekeeper and school fees, his father had to take Michael away and send him to the local grammar school. "I shared all the suburban prejudices about public education and assumed I was going to a rough school. In fact the private school had been all beating and bullying, and Kingston Grammar was perfectly regulated; it took a long time for my suspicions to settle, but it was my good fortune to be sent there because it gave me a good education," says Frayn. He sent two of his three daughters to state schools, but transferred his third to the private sector when comprehensives came in.

Versatility was a characteristic from an early age. He would make his own newspapers and, under the influence of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons novels, wrote a long novel about dinghies and sailing – "about which I knew absolutely nothing."

By the time he left school he was pretty sure that he wanted to be a journalist, but he was whisked off to train as a Russian interpreter on National Service. Then it was off to Cambridge to read first modern languages and then philosophy, and on to a reporting job on the Manchester Guardian.

Much has been made of Frayn's Chekhovian side, and it is true that his shrewd, witty translations have played an important part in lifting the drizzle of misery in which the British theatre had shrouded Chekhov for much of the 20th century. It is also true that Frayn, like Chekhov, is a polymath who did his time as a professional humorist. But to describe him as Chekhovian is to ignore the feature that unites his oeuvre, and sets it apart from anyone else's: he is first and foremost a journalist, with a reporter's ability to smell a story and then research it and find the right form for it. In Noises Off, that research took him to the heart of an actor's neurosis; in Copenhagen, it enabled him to find humanity in the uncertainty principle; in Spies, it takes the reader to the point in childhood at which memory is formed, before there are any reference points to give those memories a context or a perspective. As the philosopher in him says: "It's not what has happened that makes the next thing happen, it's how people perceive what has happened."

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It all comes back to the good old journalistic concept of a good story. "Very deep in both journalism and fiction and life in general is the concept of a story," he says. "Why are some things a story and others just a sequence of events? All journalists recognise a story, and that's why they begin to tell it, but it's very difficult to say what a story is. Any definition you try to advance will fall down immediately." All you can do is to carry on telling – and hopefully selling – the story.

4Read the annotation and several blurbs about the novel

Headlong.

Headlong attracted a good deal of praise when it was published. Ian McEwan described it as ‘a very strange novel . . . Unlike anything else around. I know the banal view will be that it shakes under the weight of its research

and scholarship. But people who say that just don't get that he is trying to do something quite odd. He really engrosses the reader in the “process” of scholarship and it's a remarkable intellectual exercise.’

In The Spectator Anita Brookner agreed declaring ‘the scholarship is dreamy, persuasive, exalted, the present-day ruminations jaunty, defensive and equally misleading. Indeed the entire novel is an intricate brainwashing puzzle, alternating abstruse objectivity with feverish intentions.’ Surely the most gratifying of accolades from such a respected art historian and writer.

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“Rueful and amusing . . . Frayn is that rare writer who succeeds as both a novelist and a dramatist.”

– The New York Times Book Review

“Finely wrought and highly comical . . . a perfect introduction to a writer who likes to pull the rug out from under your feet while offering you the most seductive of smiles.”

– Seattle Times

“Exceedingly funny, both in event and in intellectual high jinks.”

– Boston Sunday Globe

“Part detective story, part art history lesson, part cautionary tale, and entirely funny.”

– The New Yorker

“Frayn isn’t stingy, even here, with the laughs, gleefully pricking holes

in the overconfidence of academic art criticism. But just below the sugar powder you bite into his tough-minded essay on how history and individual human folly combine and conspire to manufacture art’s ‘message.’”

– Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Delightful . . . This novel, deadpan hilarious and wonderfully written, is as effective a work of historical reconstruction as it is a comedy.”

– The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Headlong offers an enthralling and refreshingly grown-up take on the alarming speed with which our morals shift to accommodate our desires, and on the lofty and low ways in which the great art of the past continues to affect us.”

– Elle

What do you think the book is about? Do these blurbs sound intriguing, captivating? Will they make people buy and read the book?

5 Read the first part of Headlong entitled Aims and Approaches and answer the questions that follow.

I have a discovery to report. Many of the world’s great treasures are known to have been lost over the centuries. I believe I may have found one of them. What follows is the evidence for my claim.

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I’m in a difficult position, though. If my claim is not accepted by scholars I shall look a fool. If it is… then I shall be in a worse position. The circumstances of the discovery are such that I shall emerge not only as a fool but as an object of outrage and horror.

I could say nothing, and no one would ever know. But if I have any pretensions to be a scholar – even to be a normally civilized human being – then I have an obligation to put my findings on record, so that my colleagues and successors, now and down the years, can evaluate them. And I must describe the tangled circumstances of this discovery of mine as fully and honestly as I can, because to arrive at a judgement they will need to examine them in the minutest detail.

Well, perhaps it’s better to be known as a fool or a rogue than not to be known at all.

It’s a painful prospect, though. Before I get to the end of this deposition I shall have to explain some shameful things. The anguish I feel about them is hard to endure. even worse, though, is the anguish of my uncertainty about what exactly I have done.

Now, where do I start?

The obvious way would be to say what I think this treasure is. And at once a difficulty arises, because it doesn’t have a name. I could simply describe it, and in due course I shall, but it wouldn’t mean very much if I tried to now, because it’s never been described before, and no one has ever had the slightest idea of what it looked like.

I think that the only way I can come at it, the only way I can bear to try, is to give up all attempt at a retrospective account. I shall have to go back in time to the very beginning, and relive what happened as it happened, from one moment to the next, explaining exactly what I thought as I thought it, when all the puzzles were actually in front of me, and what I was trying to do at each moment, given the possibilities that seemed open to me then, without the distortions of hindsight. This has its advantages. My tone’s going to sound inappropriately light minded at times. But that’s the way it was. The tone of most of the things we do in life is probably going to

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turn out to have been painfully unsuitable in the light of what happens later.

So, from the beginning.

We are back in last year. Last year is now. It’s early spring. a particularly appropriate jumping-off point, as will become apparent.

What’s the first sign that something unusual is starting to happen?

I suppose it’s a length of frayed twine.

The same length of twine, it occurs to me, that will bring the story to its end.

6 Answer the questions below.

1)Which treasure has the narrator found?

2)Why does Martin Clay consider spring as an “appropriate jumping-off point”?

3)What is symbolic about the last paragraph in Aims and Approaches? Why does the narrator mention twine several times? Which role will it play in the narration? (Baler twine – http://horses. about.com/od/productandbookreviews/tp/balertwine.htm)

4)Find as many definitions of HEADLONG as possible. Which idea is associated with it? Choose one which best suits this novel. How does the title “Headlong” contribute to the contents of the novel?

5)Which Bruegel’s painting is chosen for the cover? Why? (Painting on the cover – http://www.abcgallery.com/B/bruegel/ bruegel5.html)

6)Why does the author use alliteration for the title of the chapter?

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