Michael Frayn Critical Essay | Critical Review by Francis King

Critical Review by Francis King

SOURCE: King, Francis. “Pretty Bubbles in the Air.” Spectator 267, no. 8514 (14 September 1991): 31-2.

In the following review, King comments that reading A Landing on the Sun is a pleasurable experience due to Frayn's successful combination of seriousness and humor.

Since Harold Wilson was as full of gimmicky wheezes as a freshly poured Pepsi of bubbles, it is in no way improbable that, after he had returned to office in 1974 in the aftermath of the miners' strike and the three-day week, he established a Policy Unit (as Michael Frayn imagines in this sparkling novel [A Landing on the Sun]) to ‘look beyond day-to-day considerations at the quality of life we should be working towards for our people’. But when the civil servant, Summerchild, who is secretary to the Unit falls to his death from a window in the Admiralty, rumours inevitably circulate that the declared aim of...
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