Man Booker Prize 2002

Longlist

Buy this book

Spies
Michael Frayn

Henrietta Ghattas

Spies is Michael Frayn's tenth novel and one in which he shows himself to be a master of his art. Novels do not come much better crafted than this.

Michael Frayn is not a writer of the broad canvas - the worlds that he creates tend to be small ones, and Spies is no exception. The quiet cul-de-sac in which Stephen spends the last summer of his childhood is a tiny corner of England, minute but perfectly formed.

The world into which Frayn draws us is one of 'dull ordinaryness' during a wartime summer. It is a dreamlike world, permeated by the scent of flowers; olfactory reminders that act as passwords to a vanished time. In this dreamlike quality of the story, Frayn displays his skill, for the very nature of memory means that, as adults, our own childhood lives exist only in sketches; some vivid, some hopelessly blurred, most imprecise and incomplete, like half-remembered dreams. It is this sense of being one step removed from, yet intimately, vividly, involved in Stephen's childhood that lifts Spies above the ordinary.

As I read I could swear that the thick, heady scent of privet rises from the pages. I'm sure that I can feel its leafy twigs poking into my back as Stephen crawls into his secret hideaway, that I can touch the packed, dry dustiness of the earth beneath him as he sits in the dense shrubbery of the hedge, watching, watching. And I can almost grasp his childish confusion, his innocent misinterpretation.

That last 'almost' is an important one, though, for while this is a novel about childhood, it is not a children's novel. Nor is it an attempt to faithfully re-create or re-enter childhood. Rather, it is a re-interpretation of childhood, from an adult point of view, as well as a skilled and dreamlike evocation of a lost world. It is also a foray into the nature of memory, and it is a novel of boundaries: between now and then, here and there, childhood and adulthood. An exploration of the lines that divide reality from memory, memory from imagination.

The world of Spies is one in which these boundaries are tested and crossed as adults crawl into childhood domains and children enter adolescence, as loyalties and family ties are broken and re-shaped, as memories and fantasies from childhood are re-examined through a grown-up lens.

There is also a darkness to the novel, the sense of a constant, lurking shadow that is just out of sight. A shadow that is not illumined until the end, when the clarity of understanding is drawn from that suggestive gloom. This is the part of the story that Stephen, as a boy on the cusp of adolescence, cannot quite comprehend. This is the mystery that the adult Stephen seeks to reveal.

Spies is not another 'crossover' novel. It does not offer us the unmediated escape into childhood that comes from reading J.K. Rowling or Phillip Pullman. The language Frayn employs is eloquently grown up, and the view of childhood he presents is firmly anchored in adulthood; in the re-interpretation that comes with the understanding of adult life.

Early on in the story Stephen learns, with his first stumbling realisation of the complexity of the adult world, that

'Even what appears to be happening directly in front of your eyes, you realise when you think about it, turns out to be something you can't quite see after all, to involve all sorts of assumptions and interpretations.'

All, in other words, is not always as it appears. As the story heads towards its conclusion, it becomes clear that this is equally true of Frayn's novel. There is more, far more, to Spies than first meets the eye, though not, perhaps, if you read it as a child.