Michael Frayn has a big brain
In his new book The Human Touch Michael Frayn this month's author of "A landing on the sun" according to the Times shows just how clever he is.
posted by Dan and Tim at 9:06 AM
posted by Dan and Tim at 9:06 AM
6 Comments:
I have to agree with John now that I've gone past the 120 page stage I'm finding it a bit navel gazing - he's clever but struggling with the semantics and philosophy to be honest...
Push through the middle and it starts to get better again as he returns to the plot. Lucky they keep leaving the tape on ...
Still haven't started it yet as stuck into the latest rather marvellous 'Granta', and reading Kate Atkinon's equally splendid 'Case Histories'. The Frayn book has sat unread in my office for the last 5 years and will be dispatched later this week...promise!
I will need great amounts of alcohol/bribery to persuade me to dig this book back out from under the bed where it has been languishing for the past couple of weeks. Otherwise I need to be abducted whilst on a trip to Beirut, stuck in a cell with only Terry bloody Waite as company - then rather than listen to him groaning on I may manage to make it to the next chapter.
I very rarely fail to finish a book, but this one I fully intend to consign to propping up the wobbly kitchen table. Maybe it's to do with hitting 50, because I just think I've got better things to do than dutifully plough through Frayn's very clever, but ultimately tedious scribblings.
That will do for starters!!
Well that's encouraged me to get going on the said tome!
I did read the book.
Like the only other book of his I have read it takes us through the uptight emotionally stifled lives of it's two mid life male protagonists. The first book "Headlong" was more obviously humourous in it's intent but I suspect that this book is supposed to amuse in that we awkardly laugh at anyone who is prepared to deviate from societies norms. Our empathy for the characters probably increases the more locked in we are to our own institutionalised lives. If you were unmarried, had no mortgage and had never worked in a large instituition you would probably feel no empathy and get no further than the first few chapters. What worries me was that I did manage to find some empathy for these characters. I could be getting older and more able to put myself in anothers shoes or I could be at least partially as sad a nobody as these two.
At times I found the book infuriatingly dull as it rambled on into the personal philosophy of a civil servant, what it takes to be one and the juxtapostion of this with a concept of true personal happiness but I guess this was developing the characters for the plot. We needed to understand the mindset in order to understand the ,on the face of it, rather pathetic lives and antics of the two men. I guess some people probably would not ever want to understand the mindset of such men and even less their lives and antics. I empathise with those who did not like it but in the end I "quite" enjoyed it.
Mr wishy washy sit on the fence - 6/10
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