MICHAEL FRAYN

Michael Frayn is known as a playwright ("Noises Off," "Copenhagen") and novelist ("Headlong," "Spies"). But this prolific British author is also a philosopher, having studied philosophy at Cambridge in the 1950s. "The Human Touch" is a profound, personal account of his work on a range of topics, beginning (and ending) with the philosophy of consciousness and passing through the nature of physical law, the problem of free will, the relationship of language and thought to reality, and the origin of the universe. These difficult ideas are effortlessly dealt with, leaving the reader with a sense of mild intoxication. Frayn's exultant prose entices and ultimately overwhelms you. Reading his arguments, I felt as though I were floating down a warm river, caught up in its playful, whirling eddies. "The Human Touch" is beautifully written. Is this a problem in a book of philosophy? Philosophical arguments are often hard to follow. There's little danger that (for example) Hegel will convince you of his thesis by his sheer eloquence. On the contrary, one must have strong inducement (a cattle prod, maybe?) to extract it from the dense tangle of his writing. Within Frayn's joyous prose, by contrast, one can lose one's grip on the underlying reasoning about, say, the nature of cause and effect. As I was borne along, delighting in his tropes, some part of my brain would feebly assert itself. ("Wait! There's a simple refutation of this point. I remember it from school — what was it?") Then I'd sink back into the flow. To be fair, Frayn claims that "The Human Touch" is not a work of philosophy, but given the topics he covers, this seems disingenuous. As an author, he has always gravitated to deep questions of existence; he is too modest in disavowing philosophical intent.