At the moment I’m reading a
novel by Michael Frayn called Spies. I picked it up at a second-hand bookshop on
the Thames , in front of the BFI which is a
place I love to browse, as only knowing Frayn as a playwright I was curious.
Turning each page in rapid
succession I realise Frayn’s novels are every bit as good as his plays. Spies
is a story about the anxieties and adventures of two imaginative boys during
the Second World War - the period soberly referred to as ‘The Duration’ - as
well as the winding and unwinding of memory and conscience as an older man
looks back on a compelling chapter of his boyhood.
Standing in a street etched
deeply in his psyche, and watched over by an unknown boy in a window, Older
Stephen pictures Young Stephen (that is, his younger self) sitting for hours and hours in exactly the spot
where a pot of geraniums now flourish. I
love his observation:
“I
ignore him (the boy at the window). I go
on thinking about that head over there, the one growing out of the geranium
pot. The thing that’s so difficult to grasp is that it’s the very
same head as the one that’s here on my shoulders thinking about it – and yet
I’ve still no more idea of what’s going on inside it than the boy behind the curtains
has about what’s going on inside my present head.”
Older Stephen juggles images
and recollections, struggling to clarify the memory of himself hiding endlessly
in a privet hedge (aka a secret WWII lookout) with the same fogginess Young Stephen
struggles to comprehend current events and childish imaginings:
“Most
of the time you don’t go around thinking that things are so or not so, any more
than you go around understanding or not understanding them. You take them for granted.”
It is this undiagnosed habit
of ‘taking things for granted’ which interests his older self, as he can see
how many times his youthful self should have stopped to ask ‘why’. Older Stephen is also
intrigued by his ability to take disparate incidents and
perceptions, rooted or not rooted in fact, and join the dots. That is, file a story in his mind, a story
which inevitably becomes a belief, whether or not it is fully logical or fair.
In a complex weave of subtle
elements, Frayn, through the voice of Older Stephen, suggests we all have an innate
desire to settle “the shifting thoughts” in our heads… the “sticky mess” of
confusion and discomfort… so as to make sense of our experience. Indeed one of the reasons the novel is
so illuminating, is because it is driven by the human, but fallible, desire to make
an inner narrative, a truth, out of a straggly collection of events and
judgements. And by a seemingly universal
tendency for personal narratives to take on a life of their own… so it often seems
too late to go back… too late to reframe or question… too late (or perhaps painful)
to bring an examiner’s light to the presumptions and actions already taken by
ourselves and others… however objectively incomplete that narrative (or
judgement) may have become.
Of course there are many
purely positive reasons why narrative is important, indeed crucial, as a tool
for life and art. I haven’t finished the novel
yet, so I expect to be further surprised by what Older Stephen sees in Young
Stephen; or learns from the juxtaposition of present rationale and post judgement. What strikes me already, however, is the
extent to which playwrights and scriptwriters have humorously played with the
repercussions of narrative as a human foible.
Take Frayn’s own theatrical hit, Noises Off: conscious and unconscious,
intended and unintended consequences flow when a set of characters are intent
on keeping up appearances, are determined to maintain a particular narrative no
matter how many ludicrous events occur because of that dogged determination. The confusion and hilarity of Oscar Wilde’s
‘bunburying’ in The Importance of Being
Earnest comes from a similar source; as does much of the posturing and
improvisation by Basil in Fawlty Towers.
For, in a dramatic piece of
work, when people have an overly desperate need to force things to conform to
their practical or psychological interpretation, to prolong a narrative, however reasonably or unreasonably constructed, it is easy to
identify and laugh at the human bind.
It takes a writer of Frayn’s
skill, however, to gently and painstakingly prize open a character’s psychology
to illuminate this same tendency in a person’s more personal story; in a
human-being’s subconscious, even as the inner narrative is being formed.
For reasons I can’t explain,
while reading the novel I have been transported in my narrative back to Italy
The reason this scene, repeated
as often as a Pavlov's dog experiment, is so ridiculous - is that the apartments, garden
and pool between these gates are on private property.
When the Commune gave permission for the owner to renovate
and extend the buildings, they compelled him to put another road, of similar
quality, immediately around the top periphery of the hill, so residents on the
other side of the incline wouldn’t be inconvenienced. He duly did and that road is always kept well
graded and accessible even in the middle of winter. This little guy, however, seeks to enforce
his right to use the ‘old access way’, despite there being a far more
convenient alternative immediately before him - such is his staunch
determination to prolong the narrative in his head which says “the landowner
should not have been given permission by the Commune to make any changes to the
road and I refuse to accept it”.
I used to get a great kick
out of watching this guy get out of his car in pouring rain and snow in order
to maintain justice as he saw it, for I figured he only had himself to blame if
he caught his death of cold for being so bloody minded. Well, ninety percent of the time I found it
funny, until one day when I left my car in front of one of the gates for five
minutes (rushing back inside to grab something I’d forgotten) which resulted in
the old guy turning up and giving me an unexpectedly aggressive
telling-off. “Use the other road, you
fool” I wanted to say, “it’s only three metres to your right and you’re making
a huge drama out of nothing”… but in the heat of the moment, and with the noise
of his incessant car horn, I couldn’t find the right Italian words so I simply waved
my arms with commensurate passion and swore back at him.
The confrontation aside, I’m
sure my point is clear: it’s hilarious to see exaggerated examples of desperate
‘hanging on’ to narrative, to one reality, if faced with obvious evidence of
other or better interpretations. It’s
like banging your head on a brick wall and hoping by the time you stop the
provocation which got you started has gone away.
But a clever writer like Frayn
leaves readers wondering: when do each of us hang on to inner narratives and
perceptions which serve no long-term beneficial purpose? And how often do we, or others, prolong a psychological
narrative with heavy justification in order to make ourselves feel better; possibly at
the expense of someone else? I have no
idea, of course, if that was Frayn’s intended message in the novel. There are other themes. Yet the wonderful value in a work of artistic
depth and quality - whether literature, theatre or the fine arts – is that it
touches our humanity, raising questions and reflections which might otherwise
never surface.
And having said that, I now need
to get back to the book, I want to know how Spies
ends.
I’m hooked on the narrative.
