Michael Frayn has long been concerned with what one might portentously call the nature of reality and, until now at least, he's always stood squarely opposed to those who've attempted to fob off the rest of us with alluring substitutes. Hence his rather puritanical obsession with pop culture and the mass media, with ignorant pundits, facile critics and, of course, the eternal PROs and admen. The novels, especially The Tin Men, have pushed the attack rather further than the journalistic pieces. Why not, he asks at one point, an eventual world in which computers play all the games, watch and appreciate each other playing the games and discuss the game afterwards on TV, watched by yet more computers? It's all very fanciful, and may seem frivolous to some, but there's a genuine anxiety some-where behind it. What is happening, not just to people's ability to distinguish truth from pretence, but to their very capacity to feel?…
Frayn took his degree in moral sciences; and if anyone doubts that his interests are indeed essentially philosophic, he should closet himself with A Very Private Life, a novel that gnaws at the mind, like some maddening if nonmalevolent virus, and leaves it hot and irritated long afterwards; a subtle, rather difficult book, unusual by any criterion and easily the most original thing he, Frayn, has done.
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