Spies by Michael Frayn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The World From Under a Hedge

There is nothing lacking in Spies. Character, plot and pace are about as close to perfect as it gets. Frayn’s understanding of the juvenile mind is formidable. His intellectual subtlety is enviable. His ethical sense is acute. He knows how to tell a story. Proust was inspired by the scent of fresh madeleines; the memory of Frayn’s narrator is provoked by the sickly stink of a privet hedge in Summer under which he spends his time in spying on the neighbourhood. The reader might expect, therefore, a less than up-beat moral.

The theme of Spies is the sort of quantum physics of everyday life. Its protagonist, Stephen, is acutely aware of the power of simple observation when he says, “Just by looking at things I shouldn’t have looked at, I’ve changed them.” This is the appreciation by age of the naive, destructive folly of youth. We change the world into something different by our smallest and most passive acts. His elderly self knows the dangers of youthful curiosity: “I think that what he instinctively grasped was this: that some things must never even be known.” One’s mere presence has consequences that can’t be anticipated.

Stephen’s epiphany is his realisation that he is responsible for what he experiences: “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.” Taking things for granted is what young people do. It could be the definition of youth. Understanding the effect of one’s life on others is what only old people can do. Unfortunately it’s a non-transferable skill. So it has to be learned, if it is learned at all, by every generation.

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