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the complete review - fiction

Spies

by
Michael Frayn

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : ultimately very satisfying, but much of the presentation is exasperating

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  Not quite a consensus, but most largely very impressed

  From the Reviews:

• "Frayns Spionagespiel ist Krimi, Kriegsgeschichte und Entwicklungsroman in einem. Es ist auch eine Reflexion über das, was wir über andere zu wissen meinen und woher." - Felicitas von Lovenberg, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "The plot is like an aircraft (...) that spends a puzzlingly long time taxiing along the runway before it finally gets airborne. Even then, it is only really in the final 50 pages that Frayn pulls back the joystick, and with a great whoosh we are up for some very showy loop-the-loops and victory rolls. (...) Spies is not as sophisticated and ambitious as Frayn's last novel, Headlong, but it is never less than witty, ingenious, and a pleasure to read." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
  
  
• "Spies is as much a work of suspense as it is of saddened reflection. Frayn is a master of the casual surprise, and the surprises here all ring true. (...) The tone is anguished and humorous by turns. It could be argued that there are almost too many revelations in the final pages, but otherwise this is a deeply satisfying account of the everyday torments and confusions experienced by a not especially bright boy at a time of international madness. Frayn has written nothing better." - Paul Bailey, The Independent
  
  
• "The unnecessary and empty suspense can’t jibe with Frayn’s insistence that the book be cast as a recollection. The same is true for the willful naïveté of the child narrator. If we are not to benefit from the older man’s perspective until the last dozen or so pages, why introduce him at the start ? (...) For all the attempts, Spies never approaches the gravitas of Copenhagen or the academic suspense of Headlong. (Despite intentions, this is to its credit.)" - Max Watman, New Criterion
  
  
• "Books read in adulthood almost never seize and enwrap your imagination like the books you read as a child, but here is one that might do the trick. (...) It recycles some familiar themes and suffers from a major drawback in the area of plausibility; all the same, it works like a charm. (...) What carries the day is the sense of adult drama off-stage, the carefully chosen period detail" - Hugo Barnacle, New Statesman
  
  
• "It is a study of what we think we know and what is real, and also of the difference between what we really know and what we are prepared to admit. It is a dark book, and a sad one" - John Lanchester, The New York Review. of Books
  
  
• "Like Copenhagen, Spies is a backward-looking meditation on an ambiguous encounter, half-remembered, half-imagined, that begins in friendship and spirals out into a galaxy of questions of loyalty, guilt and complicity, the unknowability of others and the strange dark matter at the fringes of the self." - Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Aside from the understated tact and ingenuity of its mystery plot, Frayn's novel excels in its rendering of the power of early impressions" - John Updike, The New Yorker
  
  
• "The key to the book's success is Frayn's decision to respect young Stephen's point of view without staking everything on recreating it. (...) Spies works as a mystery, as a war story and as a coming-of-age narrative. The only thing it can't quite be, despite its author's intellectual background, is a work of philosophy. There are some slightly strained passages, ponderings with a whiff of the seminar, rather too methodical for the context" - Adam Mars-Jones, The Observer
  
  
• "This is such a sensuous book that at times, while never trying to be poetic or melodic, it comes near to painting or music. (...) The distinction of this novel is in evocation of lost landscape.(...) As always, Frayn has made a usual subject entirely his own." - Jane Gardam, The Spectator
  
  
• "(T)he framework does mar the ending of the book, when the wrapping-up of Stephen's intervening years is psychologically perfunctory. But all the rest of Spies actually improves upon re-reading, which is the true test of depth. It is cerebral and sensuous; extremely funny and yet deeply serious about the peculiar mixture of curiosity and profound incuriousness that characterises children -- and, Frayn suggests, adults too." - Caroline Moore, Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "It is an odd, original, haunting little tale in which the teller is the really interesting thing. (...) But the book's real merit lies in the way Stephen comes to understand the truth behind the mysteries of his world by beginning to understand something about the difference between men and women. This is achieved entirely without crudity. (...) (A) modest but memorable book." - Robert Nye, The Times
  
  
• "Spies draws much of its force from the narrative's subtly inverted echoes of other novels." - Jonathan Keates, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "It is equal parts compelling war story, painful love story and unraveling mystery." - Robert Allen Papinchak, USA Today
  
  
• "Für deutsche Leser hält dieser bewundernswerte Roman eine unangenehme Pointe bereit. Sie hat zu tun mit Hitlers Krieg gegen England und mit der Verfolgung der Juden. (...) Man wird wider Willen der Tatsache gewahr, dass selbst in diesem englischen Kammerspiel über Unordnung und frühes Leid die deutsche Vergangenheit nicht vergeht." - Ulrich Greiner, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       When one has read Spies in its entirety it feels like a success. One closes the book impressed by how Frayn has tied everything together, and one is more than satisfied with the explanations he offers. The closing section, in which everything (indeed, more than one expects) is revealed, is remarkable. And yet it is hard to be truly enthusiastic about the book.
       The problem is largely one of perspective. The book is narrated by Stephen Wheatley, now an old man, who reminisces about events that happened in his childhood, during World War II. At the beginning of the book he feels the need to stroll down "Memory Lane" once again -- to "the last house before you go round the bend and it turns into Amnesia Avenue" as he tells his children. And so he sets off for London, to revisit the Close where he grew up and where something happened .....
       Frayn tries his best to evoke a feeling of nostalgia and lost youth and innocence and present an old man seeking to recapture time past, but he doesn't succeed. There are smells and sounds and words, and it's all enough -- too much ! too much ! -- to make a reader gag. Worse yet, first-person narrator Stephen switches largely to the third person in describing his younger self and his adventures -- perhaps appropriate, given that the young boy is an entirely different person from what the old man has become, but it's all done in a way that is terribly annoying.
       There are hints of the ultimate truths right from the beginning in these looks back:

Stephen Wheatley ... Or just plain Stephen ... On his school reports S.J.Wheatley, in the classroom or the playground just plain Wheatley. Strange names. None of them seem quite to fit him as I watch him now.

"People make awful asses of themselves with let's pretend, you see, old chap. Get themselves in no end of a muddle."

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Links:

• Faber publicity page
• Picador publicity page
• DTV publicity page
• Interview at The Guardian

• Alan in Belfast
• The Baltimore Sun
• Books, Time, and Silence
• carpe librum (German)
• Collected Miscellany
• Culture Wars
• Curled Up with a Good Book
• Fernham
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
• The Guardian
• The Mookse and the Gripes
• New Statesman
• The New York Times
• The New York Times Book Review
• The Observer
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
• Sunday Telegraph
• taz (German)
• USA Today
• Whistling Shade
• Die Zeit (German)

• Michael Frayn at Literature Matters
• Interview in BOMB Magazine
• Interview in The Paris Review
• Profile from The Guardian

• Balmoral
• Celia's Secret (US title: The Copenhagen Papers)
• Copenhagen
• Democracy
• Headlong
• Matchbox Theatre
• Skios

• See the index of Contemporary British fiction at the complete review
• See the index of Drama at the complete review

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About the Author:

       British author Michael Frayn was born in 1933. He is best known as a playwright. He has also written several acclaimed novels.

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© 2003-2015 the complete review

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