Spies by Michael Frayn

*contains spoilers*

Stephen Wheatley, the narrator of Frayn’s bildungsroman, Spies, embarks on a journey of reminiscence and lamentation of his early years following a nostalgic whiff of “liguster”, later identified as “privet”, on his daughter’s driveway one evening. Now a man of eighty-something, Stephen leaves his homeland of Germany for the Close of his childhood town in England, as he yearns to search for the answers to the questions painfully reawakened by his olfactory senses.

Frayn uses Stephen as an unreliable narrator, fluctuating sporadically between Stephen’s past and present self as he reminisces on the events that shaped his transition from naïve innocence to realised maturity. This method of Frayn’s not only effectively accentuates the differences between the two Stephens, it also creates gaps in the plot providing the reader with further unanswered questions, creating a sense of tension and growing interest as Stephen’s memories are broken, realised, questioned, reconsidered and doubted; “whispering…some thing secret…dark and unsettling…at the back of my mind,” (P4) There is a feeling of restlessness, of something unsolved and unresolved, all stemming from a playful remark made by Stephen’s only friend in the Close, Keith Hayward, precipitating the titular game of “Spies”.

“My mother is a German spy” – these are the words spoken by Keith that lead, essentially, to the loss of Stephen’s innocence, and to his burgeoning sexual maturity through the events that occur in the text. As the boys search for clues in their innocent game, they stumble upon facts that they themselves cannot answer: little “x” marks in red left monthly in Mrs Hayward’s diary; a tin box containing a pack of cigarettes, a darned sock and a note with “x” written on it; a coughing tramp in a corrugated shelter at the end of the dusty road no one goes down – all of these elements with connotations of a mature or sexual nature that these two boys, playing their innocent game of spies, could never truly comprehend. But Stephen grows and he begins to realise, all the while making his own discoveries in the world of the mature and the sexual. Frayn uses symbolism in a number of ways to reflect Stephen’s sexual maturity: the phallic symbol of the cigarette that Stephen smokes with Barbara Berrill in the den, which represents their growing rebelliousness and sexual adolescence; Barbara’s very own yonic symbol, her purse, which Stephen begins to notice slung round her shoulder as the text progresses; and the slime that Stephen observes on Keith’s mother’s hair and shoulders as she emerges from the tunnel during her affair with Keith’s uncle Peter, which signifies the messy and complicated world of sexual relationships.

Characterisation is key, also: Frayn presents Mr Hayward as an antagonistic obstacle that Stephen must defy in order to prove to himself his own bravery, even if he fails; Mrs Hayward’s perfect exterior, which slowly erodes as she weeps in Stephen’s presence in the boys’ lookout, challenging notions of any definitive line between the naïve child and the assured adult; and Stephen’s own father, the real German spy in the Close, who is a kind and compassionate intellectual whom Frayn uses to juxtapose the fear and awe with which Keith and Stephen regard Mr Hayward.

Frayn presents the novel in eleven concise and eventful chapters, where he winds up the tension, only to persistently leave the reader guessing until they slowly but surely piece the puzzle together for themselves. There is no conclusive answer in the text to every question, as Frayn presents the novel through an old Stephen Wheatley, our unreliable narrator, who is looking back at the events with fallible hindsight and through the uncertainty of memory. Frayn does also manage to balance comedy, drama and tragedy, allowing each aspect to compliment and juxtapose the next, and captures beautifully the bittersweet complexities and confusion of gradual and testing maturity.