Michael Frayn Critical Essay | Critical Review by Stephen Wall

Critical Review by Stephen Wall

SOURCE: Wall, Stephen. “Going to Bed with an Author on Your Reading List.” London Review of Books 11, no. 16 (28 September 1989): 18.

In the following review, Wall praises Frayn's engaging, readable narrative voice in The Trick of It, describing the novel as “a fable of literature's ambivalent power.”

Michael Frayn hasn't published a novel for 16 years, but it's immediately clear from his new one that he hasn't lost the trick of it. After so long a lay-off some self-consciousness might have been expected, but Frayn has turned this potential liability to advantage by making it an essential part of his subject. The Trick of It is, among other things, an essay on itself, but the reflexive element is saved from a merely formal aridity by its comic brio and its uneasy respect for human mysteriousness.

In his early days as humourist—or satirist, as the term then was—Michael...
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