BORN IN THE CHINESE YEAR OF THE WATER rooster, thus bracketing him with Kierkegaard, Joan Rivers, Michael Caine and Boxcar Willie, playwright, novelist and student of philosophy Michael Frayn, 73, doubles up as an astrological Virgo. These stellar propensities, though, stay unmentioned during the course of our brief conversation. Already intimidated by the rigour of his latest foray into philosophy, The Human Touch, I refrain from the slightest whiff of such astral mish-mash. Water roosters do not suffer fools.
He has taken his spectacles off. His domed forehead is mapped with deep grooves. His shirt is white, his chinos blue. But what does this mean, the blueness of blue? Once you have tussled with The Human Touch the sense of things being ill-defined or provisional tends to haunt each sentence you utter.
Frayn, a stork of a man whose head seems somewhat heavy for his body, emits a no-nonsense sense of gravitas. My water rooster informant declares the type to be "flinty and meticulous. He can always find a new way to make a living out of nothing ... and dreams of leisure time to lie about reading novels and books on philosophy." My informant fails to realise that Frayn produces such booty as well as consuming it.
He made a starry reputation first as a satirist, writing a bracingly funny column for the Guardian in the early 1960s. His first novels, all five of them comedies, none of which sold well, won critical plaudits (The Russian Interpreter scooped the Hawthornden Prize in 1967), while his philosophy tome, Constructions, a series of 309 numbered thoughts ("you can't live in the present any more than you can live in the border between Kent and Sussex"), set him in territory occupied by the century's greatest thinkers (Frayn read moral sciences at Cambridge).
His recent novels, among them Headlong (shortlisted for the Booker Prize) and Spies (Whitbread Award winner two years ago), have sold better. Does Frayn harbour the instincts of the spy? 'Mmm ... not really. I only hesitate because, in a sense, all fiction writers are spies. Although they seem to be taking part in human life, they then go away and report on other people's activities.' "
Scotsman.com Living - Books - The wise guy:
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