Michael Frayn: Spies

By SUE YOUNGER

Stephen is an old man now, but a certain smell always evokes difficult memories of a seminal series of events from his wartime childhood.

In beautifully controlled flashbacks, Stephen recalls the time he and his friend Keith became convinced that Keith's mother was spying for the enemy, Germany. Obsessively observing Keith's parents, the boys uncover not the exciting melodrama they expected but some tragic, yet painfully ordinary, adult secrets.

It is the writing that is the star of this excellent book. The use of a child as narrator is a tour de force as the story is teased out, the reader's perspective changing with Stephen's developing understanding of what he sees.

Right to the end there are twists and turns which alter our view of events. Out of a tiny series of incidents, insignificant in the face of world events at the time, Frayn coaxes comedy, suspense and drama.

The writer is fascinated by the way fiction, and memory, can play with perspective. Who is loyal, who betrayed, who the spy and who the spied upon change according to the individual and cultural perspective of the observer. What people see is often complicated by what they think and feel.

Even language is not a trustworthy means of communication: to an adult "privet" is a label for a hedge, to a child, a misspelled plea for privacy. Frayn exploits both the comic and tragic potential of these differing perspectives with great skill.

Spies also captures the confusion Stephen feels as, desperate to be a hero, he discovers that he, and indeed all the adults he knows, are very unheroic.

In his mind he is at the centre of a childish adventure story with all the reassuring certainties such stories have about good and evil.

But his desire to divide his world neatly into heroes and villains fails miserably, and his feelings for people do not always fit with his assessment of their behaviour as right and wrong.

Cruelty comes not from the baddies but from the character Stephen's community would see as the wronged party.

And he is half in love with his friend's mother, only to discover that her beauty and elegance are not symbolic of goodness and innocence as he had assumed, and that her courage takes a very confusing form.

Spies is a satisfying exploration of betrayal, bravery and memory from an accomplished writer, totally in control of his material.

Penguin
$34.95

* Sue Younger is an Auckland documentary-maker.