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Old hand
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Skios By Michael Frayn,
Faber, Rs 599
The Man Booker has become a much maligned prize over the last dozen years or so. A number of acclaimed authors have been very derisive about the juries that get selected and the parameters they employ to arrive at their conclusions. Many are vocal in their belief that the Man Booker inclusion is a publisher’s and not an author’s challenge. Increasingly, revenue earning, not eminence, is becoming the name of the game, and a candidate’s subsequent work prods the market to wake up and buy. This to the negative block is the Man Booker Bounce, and prominence, they say, is more indicative of the prize than the other word. Every time a new media rumpus happens, our cynicism increases, and we are fast approaching a state of mind in which every award, be it a Nobel or an Oscar, a Borlaug or a Booker, appears iffy.
I’m afraid I don’t belong to that negative block because such a mindset, I think, is too severe, and too convenient. Instead, what needs thinking about, as one understands it, is why the administrators do not give their jury a standard template to work with; why each year’s jury sets its own parameters for judging the entries. And what were this year’s parameters? The merits of Michael Frayn’s Booker long-listing for Skios, his latest novel, would be clearer if one knew. He was short-listed for the Booker in 1999 for his applauded tragic-comic caper, Headlong. So, have the considerations changed?
Frayn is 79 and his output is immense, spanning about 50 works of fiction, plays, translations from Russian literature, non-fiction and film and TV writing. In spite of this, it took me quite a while to learn about him. His celebrated play-within-a-play, Noises Off — essential source material for drama companies that are trying to find their feet and for those that have already found theirs — like The Mousetrap and The Woman in Black, is obligatory viewing in the West End but, sadly, it had been running for many years before I got to see it, where it is probably still running. Incidentally, the play within Noises Off is called Nothing On.
Frayn’s latest novel, Skios, showcases his genius for contrivance and coincidence. People are mistaken for who they are not, who find themselves in the wrong places all the time and sometimes the wrong beds, who pick up someone else’s baggage at the airport and someone else’s girlfriend, later on. Doors slam shut, windows burst open, pathways lead to the wrong apartment or the right apartment with the wrong people in it. The farce is heightened because one of the two main men in the book is famous and the other is infamous.
The eminent Dr Norman Wilfred has flown in as a guest speaker at the annual lecture for the Fred Toppler Foundation, ensconced in the pretty Greek island of Skios; his audience, all glitter and money, have arrived in their yachts and charters to listen to this world authority on the scientific organization of Science, without a clue to what it all could mean. Dr Wilfred is upper-middle aged, fat, finicky and allergic to lilies, salt, onions, and is in a black mood because the airline has lost his suitcase. Not just that, in a Meet and Greet mix-up, he has been driven to someone’s deserted villa at the wrong end of the island. Once there… well we will leave it at that. The other man is Oliver Fox, youngish, handsome, somewhat newsworthy and a ‘chancer’ with women, who has flown into Skios to spend a love-week with a woman he has picked up at a bar back in London the week before. The pretty personal assistant of the foundation mistakes him for Dr Wilfred at the airport, the lord be thanked for this, and he, being the cad he is, plays along and is driven to the foundation’s sprawling estate. Once there… we will leave that alone too, because to give away the rest of the story would be unfair to both Dr Wilfred and Oliver Fox. Suffice to say that Frayn, the accomplished playwright, knows the importance of a last act, and in Skios, delivers in spades.
Having set the tone for what is to follow, Frayn, who was once called “the laureate of chaos”, slaps on the slapstick, but his results are not Chaplinesque in that his story manipulates the characters and not the other way round. I would find a parallel in Ketan Mehta’s darkly brilliant Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro, or perhaps a Guy Ritchie caper. As a matter of fact, Skios is very visual, almost film-like in its form. One is soon wobbling along from image to image, trying to make sense of the plot as Frayn asks you to suspend your disbelief at what obviously doesn’t make sense in this age of Wikipedia and Facebook posts, because Oliver Fox has convinced everyone at the foundation — staff, founder, guests — that he indeed is Dr Wilfred.
The soul of farce, Frayn, an old hand at the game, knows, lies in the manner in which such ruses can be sustained, and for how long. Whereas Georges Feydeau and Shakespeare, writing somewhat before his time, also knew that satire, even slapstick, need ballast to prevent them from floating aimlessly away, so they brought in undercurrents of human folly and the domino effect of one impetuous act on the lives of many other people. It is not an easy genre to embrace, this keeping the visceral separate from the cerebral, but Michael Frayn has been risking it time and again. Do they shortlist in the Man Booker for persistence?
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