Spies

Publisher and industry reviews

Jacket review

'Deeply Satisfying... Frayn has written nothing better.' Independent; 'Spies improves upon rereading, which is the true test of depth. It is cerebral and sensuous; extremely funny and yet deeply serious.' Sunday Telegraph

UK Kirkus review

In his play Copenhagen, which focused on two scientists involved in the race to develop the atom bomb, Michael Frayn explored Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - the startling idea that events at the molecular level are changed by being observed - and used it as a metaphor for human relationships and self-understanding. This new novel applies similar notions to English suburban family life at the time of the Second World War. The observer who unwittingly changes his neighbours' lives is Stephen, a schoolboy whose fantasies take their colouring from his dominant and socially superior friend Keith. After Keith reveals his unshakeable conviction that his mother is working as a German spy, the two friends conduct a concerted intelligence-gathering campaign from their headquarters within a patch of neglected shrubbery. The reader can see that they are wildly amiss in the way they interpret the clues - for example, the regular monthly icons entered in the suspect's diary are obviously more likely to be menstrual than military. Yet the underlying facts behind the observed patterns of adult behaviour remain elusive. We begin to suspect adultery, or perhaps some kind of covert charitable enterprise. Then three-quarters of the way through the book, just as the childhood suppositions are beginning to wear a little thin, Frayn works an astonishing alchemy that creates a moving meditation on growing up, loyalty and betrayal, time, identity, sexual awakening, suffering and mortality. Stephen is initiated into the painful complications of the adult world, which sheds its veil of childish make-believe to reveal a troubled emotional substructure. There are some extraordinary tense and important child-adult encounters in which every word said is heavy with significance. Stephen finds himself cornered, unable to either act or speak without sending some ripple of damage through the adult world that sustains him. The prose scarcely puts a syllable wrong, and we are spellbound, and surprised at every turn, until the beautiful, sad coda. Only afterwards are we likely to be much troubled by the narrative's profound implausibilities. (Kirkus UK)

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