Volume 49, Number 11 · June 27, 2002
Knowing and Not Knowing
By John Lanchester
Spies
by Michael Frayn
Metropolitan, 261 pp., $23.00
Michael Frayn is, in the quietest, most intelligent and low-key way, something of a freak. Nobody since Chekhov has been as good at both plays and fiction, or as productive: Spies is his tenth novel, Copenhagen was his thirteenth play. This is such an odd dual achievement that one can pass over it too quickly; but the fact is that it is extraordinarily rare to have made such an impact in both forms of writing. When one considers, also, how few novelists have made a success of screenwriting—especially in proportion to the number who try—it is hard to resist the conclusion that something about scenic form, perhaps its linearity and lack of redundant detail, is incompatible with the inherently expansive mode of fiction, even apparently spare, story-driven fiction. It's as if fiction and drama depended on separate talents, separately inherited.
Review, 3480 words
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