SOURCE: Hensher, Philip. “Triumphant Comedies of Failure.” Spectator 283, no. 8941 (18 December 1999): 55, 57.

In the following review, Hensher provides an overview of Frayn's novels and plays, focusing on the theme of failure in interpersonal communication, with specific emphasis on the novel Headlong.

Michael Frayn's Headlong didn't win the Booker prize this year, and no one can have been surprised, only rueful. The odds are heavily against any remotely comic novel, and it long ago turned into a prize for good behaviour by unexciting novelists. Anything further from a piece of good behaviour by an unexciting novelist than Headlong can hardly be imagined; it is a reckless, vulgar, ceaselessly entertaining romp. The ferocious comedy that results when avarice collides with the high-minded purity of the art world is sustained by a fierce intelligence, a mind which is at least as fascinated by abstract thought as by the motives of human beings. To...