Michael Frayn: The Russian Interpreter (1966)

Edition: Penguin, 1967
Review number: 835

Frayn's second novel is more interesting than his first, The Tin Men, and shows the influence of Evelyn Waugh (in, say, Scoop) rather than J.B. Priestley. Paul Manning takes on part time Russian-English interpreting while working in Moscow to complete his Ph.D. thesis. He then meets the gorgeous Raya, and begins an affair, but makes the mistake of introducing him to his employer, English businessman Gordon Proctor-Gould. Raya and Gordon begin an affair of their own but, having no language in common, have to bully Paul into acting as their interpreter.

This being Soviet Russia, political aspects to this situation quickly emerge, with the thought occurring to both Paul and Gordon that Raya might turn out to be a police spy. Raya acts quite strangely, and starts pilfering Gordon's possessions; either she is forced to steal by poverty or psychology, or the thefts have a more sinister purpose.

There are numerous parallels with Scoop, particularly in terms of the characters. Paul, for example, is very similar except for his profession, to William Boot, while Raya is reminiscent of Kätchen. However, The Russian Interpreter is nothing like as funny as Waugh and, like several other Frayn novels, leaves me thinking that he is a good playwright.

Michael Frayn: The Tin Men (1965)

Edition: Fontana, 1971
Review number: 422

Michael Frayn's first novel is like the comic novels of J.B. Priestley, especially Sir Michael and Sir George, rather than those of Evelyn Waugh, with whom the quoted reviews on the cover compare him. Waugh's melancholy side is absent from The Tin Men, and it is more directly satirical, though the novel is as funny as the comparison suggests.

The satire is about mechanisation and depersonalisation, the latter a theme to which Frayn returned several times as a novelist. Preparations are under way for the opening of a new wing at the William Morris Institute for Automation Research, and as increasingly detailed arrangements are made for the Queen's informal visit, the stress tells on the eccentric characters working to replace as much of human life as possible by computers, freeing people to do "the really important things".

The automatic versions of everyday life are, of course, where the satire comes in - meaningless headlines written by newspaper machines are a typical example. I rather liked the experimental ethics department robots, programmed to throw themselves off a capsizing raft to save a being more complex than themselves, engaging in fights to the death when two are placed on the raft. In most cases, the targets are fairly easy to hit but the satire is still funny. The Tin Men is amusing, but Frayn has gone on to write far more subtle novels.

Michael Frayn: A Very Private Life (1968)

Edition: Fontana, 1981
Review number: 306

Michael Frayn is so well known today as a playwright that it is strange to realise that he was first a journalist and then a novelist. And his novels are very different from his plays, often being science fiction and written in a whimsical manner. Despite the tone in which it is written, A Very Private Life wants to say some fairly serious things about Western culture in the second half of the twentieth century.

The novel is set a fair way into the future, when humanity has split into two classes, Insiders and Outsiders. Insiders live in sophisticated houses, in which every necessity for life is provided through holovision and drugs - instead of feeling emotions at the whim of nature, when they could distress or embarrass, they take drugs to produce or suppress feelings when their expression is socially desirable. Even their holidays are taken in this way; they never go out of their houses into the real world. Why should they, when the holograms they experience can have the real world's imperfections removed?

The Outsiders, by contrast, live among the ruins of less up to date houses, and take on the manual labour of the world. They continue to wear clothes, abandoned by the Insiders, and are thought of as animals by the other class. (In a neat inversion, they wear dark glasses to be considered decent - so that others cannot know what they are thinking.)

Uncumber is brought up as a privileged Insider, but never really fits in. She craves real experience, refusing to take the drugs with her family, switching off the holographic representations of visitors. Eventually, she manages to go Outside, but then finds she cannot fit into Outsider society either.

The clear targets of A Very Private Life are the ways in which modern Western society cuts each one of us off from true human companionship. I once met some people who had worked in West Africa. When talking to a group of Ugandans about life in England, they described shopping in a supermarket. The idea of a building in which you could find all your shopping did not surprise them, for they believed England a land of marvels. They could not believe, however, that it was possible to do all your shopping there without speaking to anyone - and not only was this a fantastic idea, but it was almost immoral in their eyes.

The Insiders do not even experience anything directly; part of their withdrawal from human contact is through the use of holovision and drugs as a substitute for interaction with the potentially unpredictable real world. It is hard not to see this as a comment on the modern TV culture, not to mention the escapist side of drug taking.

How little Frayn approves of these aspects of modern life is shown by one particular incident. After some time outside, Uncumber unwittingly gets involved with a group of criminals; she is put into what is a prison for Outsiders, yet it turns out to be almost identical to the home in which she was brought up.