Michael Frayn

This is a rare reread for me, which I mean to but rarely do. It's a short, dated-yet-relevant satire on academia & academics, technology, bureaucracy, etc., etc. It's set around the privately sponsored, new ethics wing of a robotics research institute, due to be opened by the Queen. That sets pretty much everything up - and the book is pretty much a brisk romp through the different permutations of personality clashes and misunderstandings that that scenario offers.

There's just enough philosophizing on computer consciousness, and axiomatic ethics, and computer-generated English to give this book more serious literary pretensions than, say, a Tom Sharpe, but I'd say that's the book's closest cousin.

There's a lot to admire and respect in this book, and there's a lot more to enjoy. Overall, the humour can be a little over-egged here and there, and the situations can boil over into farce, but it manages to hold itself up as a slight novel of ideas.
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A strangely detached, yet gripping story of wartime childhood secrets, told by Stephen Wheatley with fifty years hindsight. The framing device of the return trip to his childhood home is usefully deployed to obtain perspective and the ability to analyse what is now the past. And the story itself is beautifully and masterfully told, even if the level of detail recalled seems unrealistic to me.
As John Updike puts in his 2002 New Yorker review:
“Aside from the understated tact and ingenuity of its mystery plot, Frayn's novel excels in its rendering of the power of early impressions, a power that fetishizes and eternalizes such modest phenomena as certain vague smells, certain details of dress coded with signs of class and origin, certain sounds betraying the life in other houses, certain coveted elegancies...”
The book is a wonderfully wrought story, although the pace of the plot is somewhat too fast towards the end compared to the leisurely start.… (more)