Skios – Michael Frayn (Faber & Faber 2012)

There was nothing that made you relish every moment of being alive so much as knowing that at the very next you might be dead.

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I gave this a try partly because a letter published ina daily broadsheet (I forget which) suggested it should make anyone’s top 10 list of humorous English novels. It had not been included by the paper’s alongside Love in a Cold Climate and Scoop, hence the correspondence. And the other reason is that I think Frayn’s Spies is an interesting novel and Noises Off is a funny play, so I wanted to see if he could do the lot.

The setup is simple; the execution less so. An English socialite with a self-centred passion for spontaneity and risk arrives on Skios as he runs from one or two ‘girlfriends’; at the same time, a middle-aged world authority on ‘the management of science’ who is there to deliver the keynote lecture at the Fred Toppler Foundation also arrives. A mix up at baggage reclaim and then arrivals launches the two on trajectories that confuse and challenge them – and subsequently many others – for the rest of the novel. Frayn’s challenge is to keep his reader onside, which he does pretty well.

It is farce in novel form but the combined Toppler Foundation and Greek island setting is such that Frayn’s stretching of his reader’s credulity is tolerated; in fact, abandoning concerns about plausibility is part of the fun. And his characters – almost all of whom are bastards in their own ways – seem constructed more for the plot to work than for us to believe in as possessing emotional depth (some are obviously nothing more than representatives of particular groups). Oliver Fox, the chancer at the centre of events, is a case in point. A blend of insouciance and inspiration, he ricochets from situation to situation, creating and then attempting to destroy his own luck. Frayn’s reference to the physical symbols of Fox’s characteristics – ‘the tousled blond hair’ and ‘lopsided smile’ – is almost overdone in terms of frequency, but such superficiality helps us to tolerate his protagonist’s selfishness.

Fox’s counterpart, Dr Wilfred Norman (“I hate names that you can never remember which way round they go!”), is enjoyably insecure for a man whose credo is the causality of the universe. His misinterpretation of the Greek word euphoksoliva and the way ‘those two hidden moles had resurfaced in his brain’ lead to some of the book’s best scenes, and the way he deals with the conflict between his celebrity and his situation is very entertaining.

There is satire – of the monied and intellectual classes, of Mediterranean politics, and of English socialites in their 30s – but it is always entertaining, never bitter. There is no moral, nothing didactic in fact – the combination of bravura, fortune and slapstick means it is all fun. And, although Frayn’s knowing narrator intervenes to confirm ‘all the many elements were now in place that would shape the culmination’, there is still no predicting the denouement, which is set in train by ‘someone with no grievances, suspicions, or schemes of his own’ reaching for a square of Turkish delight.