Spies

by Michael Frayn

Overview

From the bestselling author of Headlong, a mesmerizing novel about secrecy, imagination, and a child's game turned deadly earnest.

The sudden trace of a disturbing, forgotten aroma compels Stephen Wheatley to return to the site of a dimly remembered but troubling childhood summer in wartime London. As he pieces together his scattered images, we are brought back to a quiet, suburan street where two boys, Keith and his sidekick — Stephen — are engaged in their own version of the war effort: spying on the neighbors, recording their movements, ferreting out their secrets.

But when Keith utters six shocking words, the boys' game of espionage takes a sinister and unintended turn. A wife's simple errands and a family's ordinary rituals — once the focus of childish speculation — become the tragic elements of adult catastrophe.

In gripping prose, charged with emotional intensity, Spies reaches into the moral confusion of youth to reveal a reality filled with deceptions and betrayals, where the bonds of friendship, marriage, and family are unravelled by cowardice and erotic desire. Master illusionist Michael Frayn powerfully demonstrates, yet again, that what appears to be happening in front of our eyes often turns out to be something we can't see at all.

Michael Frayn is the author of nine novels, including the bestselling Headlong, which was a New York Times Editor's Choice selection and a Booker Prize finalist. He has also written thirteen plays, among them Noises Off and Copenhagen, which won three Tony Awards in 1999. He lives in London.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780571268856
Publisher:	Faber and Faber
Publication date:	05/05/2011
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.80(h) x (d)

About the Author

Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer. He has written seventeen plays, including Noises Off, Copenhagen, and Democracy, translated Chekhov's last four plays, and adapted his first as Wild Honey. His screenplays include Clockwise, starring John Cleese, and among his eleven novels are The Tin Men, Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong, Spies, and Skios. Collections of articles include Collected Columns, Stage Directions, and Travels with a Typewriter. He has also published two philosophical works, Constructions and The Human Touch, and a memoir, My Father's Fortune. His most recent publications are three collections of short entertainments, Matchbox Theatre, Pocket Playhouse, and Magic Mobile. He is married to the writer Claire Tomalin.

Read an Excerpt

I don't know how Keith notices the first of the secret signs. I realize that he's stopped turning the pages and brought the diary very close to his eyes, the magnifying glass forgotten.

"What?" I whisper. He points to the space for a Friday in January. It seems at first to be empty. Then I see some kind of handwritten mark, nestling inconspicuously in the little gap between the date itself and the phase of the moon: a tiny x.

He slowly turns the pages of his mother's diary. More x's. As I record them, a pattern begins to emerge — the x, whatever it is, happens once a month. In some places it's crossed out, and entered a day or two earlier or later.

"She has meetings," I suggest. "Secret meetings. They're planned in advance only sometimes the person can't come so they have to change the date . . ."

"Look at the moon," Keith whispers. I go back to the beginning, tracking the phases of moon. Yes, the little x's are approximately keeping step with the lunar calendar.

"The night of no moon," he says. The hairs rise on my neck. I can see the possibilities as clearly as he can — the unlit plane landing on the fairway of the golf course, the parachutist falling softly through the perfect darkness . . .

Reading Group Guide

Discussion Questions
1. Throughout Spies, Stephen looks back on his friendship with Keith, a friendship that is,
like the novel itself, in both the present and past tense. Trace the arc of their relationship.
Why is it so lopsided? And was their break-up inevitable, in your view? Explain.
2. Explore the links between plot and memory in this novel. How, if at all, is the structure and pacing of this narrative determined by the recollections, associations, and rediscoveries of its narrator?
3. Stephen, the hero of Spies, is a professional translator who looks back—in painstaking,
suspenseful detail—on his childhood. What else, in the fullness of the novel, do we come to learn about Stephen—as a boy and as a man? Discuss Spies as Stephen's attempt to translate his boyhood self into the person he is now. What can Spies teach us about the changing nature of the self, about the flux that is identity?
4. In Chapter Three, Keith's mother turns from her household duties to address Keith and
Stephen jokingly and directly: "'Bang, bang!' she says humorously, pointing an imaginary gun at us, as if we were children. ‘Got you, the pair of you!'" Discuss various ironic connotations of this remark.
5. Much of the action in this novel concerns game-playing. What sorts of games are played here? Are they innocent or dangerous, imaginary or real? And who plays them—children,
adults, both? Later in Chapter There, Stephen observes: "Never before, though, has [the game hep lays with Keith] become real, really real, in the way that it has this time."
Where else in the novel are we (and/or Stephen) alarmed, even frightened, by the tension between how things seem and how they "really" are?
6. Review the scene shared by Stephen and Barbara Berrill inside the lookout in Chapter
Eight. How do such adolescent pastimes as kissing, smoking cigarettes, sitting in a hideout, and gossiping reflect the broader themes of Spies? Discuss how human longing and love itself function amid the key mysteries in this mystery novel.
7. Explain the meanings and properties attributed to "X" in Spies. What does this letter mean to Stephen and Keith? What does it mean to Keith's mother? What about the symbolic/semiotic/semantic baggage of the letter? Also, explain why and how Stephen links the words germ and German.
8. Identify those passages where Stephen, looking back on the people and events of this tale,
is conflicted by what he did say or do and what he could have—or should have—said or done. What other characters herein are likewise conflicted? Support your views with excerpts from the novel.
9. Define the German terms Fernweh and Heimweh. What does Stephen mean when he applies these terms to his own experiences? How, if at all, might these two terms also be applied to the novel in general?
10. Look again at the lat pages of Spies. Who, after all, was the man hiding out in the pit?
Why was he there? Discuss this man's reasons for his actions, both during the war and

after. Discuss, also, the "shame" that Stephen attributes to him.

Editorial Reviews

Bitter memories of the home front during WWII resurface in this muted yet moving tenth novel from popular British author Frayn (The Copenhagen Papers, 2001, etc.) and playwright (Noises Off, etc.). In a Proustian prologue, a mysteriously sweet outdoor aroma evokes indistinct memories of its narrator Stephen Wheatley's youth in a tightly knit suburban "close" during the war years. Returning to his home village, the now elderly Stephen "sees" a series of scenes featuring his young self and his confident, domineering best friend Keith Hayward. "He was the officers corps in our two-man army," Stephen muses, while recalling the elaborate system of wires and tunnels the boys had constructed between their two houses, and the military games they had played in imitation of the larger conflict ongoing in Europe-culminating in acts of secrecy and surveillance prompted by Keith's astonishing declaration that "My mother … is a German spy." Frayn sticks close to Stephen's timid sensibility, thrown into tormented relief by the boy's growing suspicion that Mrs. Hayward's frequent brief absences from home and habit of "visiting" a nearby railway tunnel are undertaken, not out of solidarity with the enemy, but in order to meet with a lover-who is perhaps a "downed" German pilot, or an "old tramp" suspected of being a sexual deviant; or in fact something much less romantic and thrilling. The story is somewhat thinly plotted, and little seems to happen-outside Stephen's busy imagination, at least-for a distractingly long time. But Frayn holds our attention with sharp economical characterizations of the frail and beautiful Mrs. Hayward, Stephen's annoyingly ordinary own family, and Keith's supremelyself-confident father, a misogynistic martinet who virtually radiates smiling, perfectly controlled menace. Only a curious overabundance of climactic surprise-twists vitiates the skill with which Stephen's ordeal of subterfuge and guilt is portrayed. A bit reminiscent of L.P. Hartley's modern classic The Go-Between but, still, an essentially original and very affecting tale.

Kirkus Reviews

. . . a master of intellectual mystery masquerading as ripping popular entertainment. . .a gorgeous melancholy that shivers the mind.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Marvelously effective. . .a novel of extraordinary power and wisdom, a tour de force of humane insight.” —The Baltimore Sun

“Bernard Shaw couldn't do it, Henry James couldn't do it, but the ingenious English author Michael Frayn does do it: write novels and plays with equal success. [He] has extended his reach and seriousness while keeping a sprightly intellectuality.” —John Updike, The New Yorker

“In Spies, recollections of actual things—the 'disconcerting perfume' of privet hedges in bloom and the flavor of lemon barley water—make Frayn's story so real you can taste it.” —Boston Herald

“[Spies] convinces American readers that Frayn, author of some thirteen novels and sixteen plays, is a literary double threat.” —The Boston Globe

“In this very English novel, secrets assume an unexpected power and excitement as Frayn reveals that a little of the fascist is buried in every clever child, and that spying can be a soul-destroying game.” —Chicago Sun-Times

From the Publisher