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First published in the Babel Handbooks series, New Lambton, NSW, Nimrod, 1997. The clouds clear, and there beyond them, stretching to the outermost limits of the fleeing universe, are more clouds: galaxies, mists made up of droplets of matter condensed out from the hot primeval gases. Perhaps each galaxy is a puff of steam left behind by cosmic locomotives racing away from us faster than light. Perhaps, on one of those cold, bright mornings when your breath condenses, God wandered through the universe, saying a word here and a word there. What he said was what people say to us in dreams. Or perhaps he was humming to himself. A phrase here - and that was Andromeda. Then he potters on a couple of a million light years, abstracted, and hummed us, and all the Milky Way around us. (Frayn, Constructions 309) The vision of God as a pottering, abstracted if omnipotent Winnie-the-Pooh, with our galaxies the visible relics of his Hums, is both arresting and original. Read Michael Frayn, and you will many more small gems, comic profundities tossed off seemingly effortlessly. Yet few critics would categorise Frayn as a writer of fantasy. A prolific journalist, playwright and novelist, he is best known as a writer of enormous comic invention, sustained from his early journalism through his 8 novels and 11 stage plays. Frayn merits a small entry in Clute and Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, but somewhat negatively, as a mainstream writer 'unafraid of appropriating sf tropes.' 'Mainstream' is a label science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts usually use for what they exclude from sf and fantasy. Why then do I find Frayn someone I desperately want to write about in this context? Why link Frayn and fantasy? Consider the aphorism of God who hummed the world. Frayn is a miniaturist in a world in which the fantasy label has been appropriated by the three volume blockbuster. His fantasy is something distinctively his own. Frayntasy, perhaps. Another good reason for linking Frayn with fantasy is that he has written one novel or play in each of the three categories Samuel Delany defines as aspects of the 'subjunctive reality' of science fiction. These are the extrapolative, the cautionary, and the alternative world story, stories of what is, what might be, and what can't be. (Le Guin, Norton Book 27) The difference is that Frayn approaches the fantastic through reflections on the problems of realism, while Delany approached this 'other side of realism' from reflections on the nature of science fiction. On the topic of the subjunctive perception of reality, Frayn comments: What deeply affects every aspect of a man's experience of the world is his perception that things could be otherwise . . . . Your view isn't simple - isn't, as one might say, entirely in the indicative mood. A shifting complex of subjunctives makes it difficult to catch. You read into it what might have been the case, and what might yet be the case. (Frayn, Constructions 42)[i] Subjunctivity is linked by Frayn to the problem of perception and the many varied and comic ways in which people impose ideas and expectations upon the world. The world out there plainly exists independently of the perceiving individual, but it is the personal act of perception and its representation in language that imposes order. (Frayn, Plays One xiii). What you see, says Frayn, is often complicated by what you think and feel, and part of what you think is that 'things could be otherwise.’ Frayn takes this fact of life and milks it for all its comic potential. Competing and contrary perceptions of the world are set against each other and the result is comic chaos and confusion. Frayn writes comedies of ideas in which the ideas hold centre stage, eg the idea of happiness (A Landing on the Sun); or the idea of eternal happiness (Sweet Dreams); the problem of perception (Clouds and Constructions); the ambiguities inherent in benevolence (Benefactors) He tackles the complementary ideas of chaos and order (Alphabetical Order, Towards the End of the Morning, Clockwise), with language as a vital tool in ordering chaos (The Trick of It). He has written a phenomenally successful stage play, Noises Off, a mad farce on the philosophy of farce. God often enters as a character, as in Sweet Dreams and in his journalism. In The Tin Men, six of the characters are robots or computers. A Very Private Life is a series of reflections on the nature of privacy, set in a near-future world in which advances in technology allow total escape from the harsh realities of the outside world. Many of Frayn's fantasies are the fantasies of everyday life. His site of fantasy is often the workaday world of the office, particularly the newspaper office. Move over, the dragon-infested swamp and the cosy burrows of hobbits. The filing system and the computer are fast encroaching on traditional fantasy territory. God, too, is often shown hard at work in a celestial office. In an interview in 1975 Frayn commented: 'A Very Private Life and Sweet Dreams are not fantasies in the sense of being an escape from what is happening. They are a way of dealing with certain aspects of real life which are very difficult to describe.' (File on Frayn 71) The writer makes the leap into fantasy because of the inadequacy, at times, of examining the real as real. Frayn says: 'It seems logical to suppose that fantasy is a projection of reality. But often one can't help feeling that it's the other way round, with the reality breaking surface as an extension of the fantasy within. The people around us are like mountain tops rising from a sea of cloud.' (Frayn, Constructions 55). I want to examine Frayn's work in the light of these comments. What is his 'trick of it' in writing? How does he illuminate those hard-to-describe aspects of real life, through his version of fantasy? I'd like to take the four clear examples of fantasy as it is usually defined, and explore them in detail. These are the novels The Tin Men (1965), A Very Private Life (1968) and Sweet Dreams (1973), and the play script Balmoral (1978). I'll also look closely at relevant aspects of Frayn's non-fiction, and aspects of his realist fiction in which the device of the idea-as-character is used. In The Tin Men Frayn examines anew the classical ethical dilemma. If two people are aboard a liferaft which will support only one of them, what is the correct course of action? Macintosh, the head of the Ethics Department at the William Morris Institute of Automation Research, decides to build a machine which behave ethically in the liferaft situation. The Tin Men are his robot ethical machines, the Samaritans. The first prototype, Samaritan 1, has a problem. It will jump overboard to save anything at all, from 60 kilos of lima beans to 40 kilos of wet cement. The second machine, Samaritan II, is more discriminating. It will jump only to save an organism at least as complicated as itself. Accordingly, it refuses to throw itself overboard to save a sandbag. But the result is that both Samaritan II and the sandbag sink to the bottom together. Samaritan III corrects this flaw. It refuses to sacrifice itself for a simpler organism and throws the sandbag overboard. At last, we think, success. But no. Place two Samaritan III's together on a life raft and both will jump. This problem is fixed in its turn, but the next step is that each then throws the other overboard. As Macintosh comments, 'We see before us all the pity and terror of the human condition, whose inexorable logic requires men to struggle with their peers for life even to the point of mutual extinction.' (Tin Men 118) The final creation, Samaritan IV, is a machine which will neither jump, nor allow itself to be pushed, but which will fight back, to the death. The Ethics Department organises prize fights. 'Isn't he a lovely scientific fighter?' yells one of the spectators. Bets are laid, on the grounds that in an ethical conflict it's important to be committed. Wait though; it is the ethical machines which are on the raft, fighting to the death, while the human characters mark up the odds, place the bets, tend the fight, cheer on their side, and generally engage in ethically outrageous behaviour. The human characters enjoy themselves immensely, while their creations, the ethical machines, take on a life and logic of their own. As Macintosh places a fiver on the favourite, he murmurs, 'I think what we have here is the essential ethical situation in all its pity and terror.' (Tin Men 120) The Tin Men was first published in 1965, very early in the computer revolution. The human condition is depicted as rapidly making way for the computer condition, though what continually gets in the way of the automation process is the sheer messiness of human lives. A central concern is with ways in which humans are like computers, and ways in which they are not. The complex order of the computer mind contrasts with the complex disorder of the human mind, which nonetheless has created the complex order and logic of the computer mind. The search for the purest of simple ethical systems in turn creates the conditions in which fatal flaws emerge in the unethical behaviour of the Samaritan robots. It is precisely the complexity of human decision-making that mitigates against the simple on-the-raft, off-the-raft decision to opt for self-sacrifice. Again, opting for self-sacrifice is itself an inherently weird ethical value. ‘Isn’t what makes such a sacrifice seem so deep to us the sheer lack of any possible justification, the total absence of return to the martyr, the mind-numbing contrariness of it?’ (Frayn, Constructions 51) Or, as Goldwasser explains to Macintosh, after Samaritan II is winched up out of the water, after it has sacrificed itself for a human: 'Doesn't it look a bit sanctimonious to you?' he asked Macintosh. 'Aye, it always does after it's gone over the side.' 'But Macintosh, if it enjoys sacrificing itself it's not taking an ethical decision at all, is it?' 'I don't see why it shouldn't enjoy doing right.' 'But if it's enjoyable then it's not self-sacrifice!' 'By God, Goldwasser, you're a real puritan! If a thing's right it's right, and if you enjoy doing it so much the better!' 'It may be right. But for God's sake, Macintosh, it's not ethically interesting!' (Tin Men 21) Even if Macintosh improves the ethical performance of his Samaritan robots, it will only be through programming computers to be as contrary as people. Frayn's technique in The Tin Men is parodic and episodic. Frayn may have two characters with opposing views (or one character having very strong views and the other character having none at all) thresh out the absurdities of a subject over the space of a chapter. Sometimes the chapter seems only tangentially relevant to the plot - or so I thought with the sub-plot where Hugh Rowe spends his office hours writing his novel, but never gets much past the blurb and page one. The quirky relevance of this sub-plot is shown in the last paragraph of the novel. Each chapter runs its comic course until all possible gags are exhausted, and the next chapter exploits a new sub-theme. It is as if the newspaper columnist in Frayn can't resist taking the mickey out of any ideas which pop into his head, even if only tangentially related to computers and office life. As Rowe drafts successive titles of his novel, he parodies the best selling novels of the sixties, with No Particle Forgot, Skulls of Glass, Take a Bloke like Me, Hear Me Punnin' to Ya. Rowe seeks, in his words of self-praise of the as yet unwritten novel, to achieve 'the staggering feat of uniting the sober density of Robbe-Grillet to the broad comic tradition of P.G.Wodehouse.' (Tin Men 17). Another running gag is the UHL or Unit Headline Language, whereby computers are programmed to write newspaper headlines from combinations of words such as Strike Threat Plea Dash Probe. (Frayn, Tin Men 57) Once the computer can be programmed to write the story to fit the headline, then newspapers will become fully automated. Indeed, with the addition of Di and Fergie to Frayn's list, it is tempting to think this might have already happened. The plot of The Tin Men, so far as there is a plot, revolves around plans for the Queen's visit to open the new wing of the Ethics Department. The workers are so busy with their plans and their own ideas of what the Queen's visit means that they do not notice that it is not in fact the Queen who opens the building, but her stand-in, Nobbs, 'a shambling bearded young man who groaned at their loyal homage and muttered "bloody hell".' (Tin Men 146) The idea of the Queen exceeds the actuality. The rehearsals for the visit take on a life and meaning of their own and are interpreted as the real thing. The first chapter of The Tin Men is a homage to Evelyn Waugh's classic satire on newspaper life, Scoop. Both Waugh and Frayn make wild use of comedy as a means of evaluating human existence, but Waugh's black humour stands in contrast with Frayn's more silvery, glittery brand. Both are brilliantly funny, but where Waugh is often cruel, Frayn is more sympathetic to the vagaries of the human condition. The Tin Men is perhaps more farce than comedy, in that the characters are there to be set up for laughs, but in his other writing, such as the realist novel, The Russian Interpreter, the characters are much more than caricature, the genre is a more rounded comedy, and the reader laughs along with Frayn in the knowledge that, even though the story is set in Cold War Moscow, no cruel fate awaits his characters. Politically Frayn and Waugh are poles apart, Frayn's left-liberalism in stark contrast to Waugh's ultra-conservatism. The ideas of some of his early Guardian columns are worked into The Tin Men in fixup mode, yet Frayn pulls off the considerable feat of sustaining an affectionately ironic tone which unites the separate segments of the novel. Ways in which privacy might be imposed on the future public sphere is one theme of A Very Private Life. The external world is both excluded from and included within the private world of the family by means of a technology Frayn termed 'holovision' back in 1968, but which today has become better known as virtual reality. Frayn takes fictional flight from the trend towards 'cocooning', the increasing tendency to retreat to the home, keeping 'inside' a place of safety and isolation from others in an increasingly polluted and dangerous outside. The opening sentences of the novel set the scene for the fairy tale of the future: Once upon a time there will be a little girl called Uncumber. Uncumber will have a little brother called Sulpice, and they will live with their parents in a house in the middle of the woods. The fairy tale soon gives way to near-future dystopia: there are no windows in the house for windows might let the air in , 'and no one would want the congenial atmosphere of the house contaminated by the stale, untempered air of the forest, laden with dust and disease.' (Frayn, Private 3). In Frayn's family of the future, all communication will be technologically mediated by means of holovision, a technology which brings a life-like image of another person, or another experience, and pipes it into the house from outside. The world is arranged so that members of the family do not have to experience it directly. There will be no need for any of them to leave their individual rooms, or the house, ever. Seeing other people 'will involve no more than selecting a number and pressing a switch.’(Private 4) . A holograph will instantly appear, and communication takes place without the inconvenience of actual physical presence. The gap between visual representation and reality closes and the experience of being in the room fades to the illusion of being anywhere else within reach of holovision technology. The illusion is created of being in the picture and taking part in the action without the experience of real discomfort or danger. Holovision replaces parenting, schools, and other people. The public world becomes the private world and the world that exists independently of us collapses into seemingly solid images. Aelfric explains how the world became as it is to his rebellious adolescent daughter Uncumber: Everything became private. People recognised the corruption of indiscriminate human contact, and one by one they withdrew from it. Whoever could afford it built a wall around himself and his family to keep out society and its demands. And in that inner keep ... we enjoy the perfect freedom that men have always dreamed of. What crippled and cut short all man's earlier experiments in freedom is that they were public, and the public freedom of one man must necessarily impinge on the public freedom of others, so that public freedoms inevitably limit and destroy each other. But our modern private freedoms impinge upon no one and nothing. And no-one, and nothing, can impinge upon them. (Private 26). Aelfric works as a decider. He explains his work to Uncumber: Some of us have to spend our lives inside doing all the world's thinking and arguing and persuading ... [Deciders] can see what's going on in the world at a touch of a switch, and talk to all the people they have to talk to, and to be in touch with all their various thinking and doing machines . . . Inside this house you're part of a secure and happy world which stretches all over the globe. Step outside it, and you're in another world altogether - the old primeval world, Cumby, where anything can happen. (Private 15-16). Filters and electronic devices keep out most of the external world, and drugs are taken to keep the inner world under control from too much boredom or over-excitement. The story revolves around the adolescent rebellions of Uncumber, who refuses to take her drugs, and who keeps asking, 'but what is it really like outside?’ She eventually escapes and finds out. There she meets members of the outside classes who do not have sophisticated communications technology, and the result is total incomprehension. (In the outside world, there are translation machines, but they are only for the information rich.) This, to me, is the least successful aspect of the book, though I suspect the language may be more than the nonsense it seems. Perhaps it is a transliterated real language, and the joke is on me (as on Uncumber) because I cannot understand a word of it. There is a certain anxiety for the reader here. What if there are huge additional jokes in this language of the future, that others see and I don't? Aelfric sees holovision technology as a technology of liberation. He regards his daughter as quite unreasonable in her struggle against the technologies of privacy for what she imagines will be her freedom in the outside world. Uncumber, on the other hand, yearns to find her true self. Uncumber's quest can be read as a critique of the unquestioning acceptance of technology in the expression of Aelfric's male 'freedom' to dominate the physical world. The reader knows Uncumber's quest is hopeless. Her technologically mediated experiences of an enhanced romantic 'virtual nature' leave her ill-equipped to cope in the real polluted world outside. The quest begins when Uncumber leaves her house and goes in search of a man she calls Noli, whom she first meets when he dials a wrong number. Uncumber assumes his name is Noli, but since she can't understand a word Noli says, she may be wrong about his name, as about everything else. When she goes out into the outside world she also encounters, for the first time in her life, the poverty of the 'outside classes', physical illness, real as opposed to virtual sex (perhaps), loud noise, snow, and real horror when she is captured by a group of French-speaking thieves and murderers. The humour comes from Uncumber's perceptions as the innocent abroad in the real world, a world she persists in interpreting in fairy tale terms despite all evidence to the contrary. A Very Private Life is a fable in the rich tradition of Voltaire's Candide. 'Things might be otherwise', says Frayn, and A Very Private Life is set in a future both familiar and novel. It is familiar in that it is set on a polluted planet Earth, where the elite can escape the consequences of their actions. It is novel in that it takes a trend in twentieth century communications technology and pushes it to quietly terrifying yet quite plausible limits. It is only when Uncumber is rescued, and cannot reach the controls of the holovision chamber in the prison room in which she is first placed, that she realises that she has lost her freedom. She knows that 'Freedom consists in having some control over one's transactions with the world outside oneself' (Private, 119) and now she knows that it is holovision technology which grants this control. Freedom, in this future world, is virtual freedom, real imprisonment. The freedom Uncumber finds in the outside world is not at all what she expected, and at the end she is grateful to retreat to another version of a very private life that she carves out for herself. In a few short sharp chapters Frayn tackles large questions with considerable wit and deceptive simplicity. In Sweet Dreams, Howard Baker is the innocent abroad in heaven. Howard is a name Frayn frequently allocates his characters. There is a minor character Howard in The Tin Men, and Howards of various Howardish persuasions appear in several sketches. 'Howard' is a name signifying a modest, likeable, educated thirty-seven year old man, someone who sits at the wheel of his car at a traffic intersection waiting for the green light, while lost in thoughts both trivial and profound. But 'the light has been green for some time already.' (Frayn, Dreams 6) The transition to the afterlife is skilfully handled as Howard absent-mindedly accelerates through the red light and, not surprisingly, least of all to Howard, finds himself on a ten lane expressway heading straight for the celestial city. 'There's something in the air in this place', says Howard when he arrives, 'I feel really alive here.' ( Dreams 9). Frayn gives a vision of heaven rather like the young Howard's first impressions of Cambridge, but a Cambridge where, instead of being an insignificant nineteen year old student again, his inherent worth is recognised, and he is chosen as the right-hand man of God. Not the God of Wrath of the Old Testament, but a bumbling, gentle, rather vague God, God as if he were an amiable and admiring Cambridge don. (His initials are A. P. J., but everyone calls him Freddie.) It is a blokey version of heaven, but that's Howard, a good bloke with modest demands on life and death, demands which merely require a heaven that offers him not only opportunities for leisure and enjoyment, but also moral and intellectual challenges. God is, of course, male. Howard could not imagine Him differently. 'How obvious everything is when once it's happened', says Howard. (Dreams, 7). Heaven is tailored to individual difference. The heaven that works for one person might be inappropriate for another. At first Howard expresses surprise to his best friend Phil, who is there to guide him. He'd thought it would mean being at one with the infinite. But Phil very sensibly points out that being at one with the infinite is not for Howard, who would soon get very bored. Nor is it a heaven of instant sensual gratification. No, that is not for Howard, either. Instead, Howard is in a place where things keep getting better and better, allowing for continual pleasure to be taken in the yearning for a state more blissful still. Howard's heaven is a comfortable suburban kind of place, where his favourite meal is regularly served, his family is there for him (both wife and girl-friend); his job is one in which he is given an ever increasing amount of responsibility with pleasure in achieving ever more interesting goals. This is a heaven where Howard finds all the things he has always longed for, from the propelling pencil with four different coloured leads he once desired as a child, to the ideal school for his own children (a good social mix with high academic standards). In short it is a British middle-class heaven, lovingly and ironically rendered. 'Howard', says Phil, 'You are the collective imagination of the middle classes compressed into one pair of trousers.' (Dreams 44) Howard is, of course, delighted to hear it. Phil is reading an old copy of Amazing Science Fiction when they first meet again, as no doubt he was in their previous life. Some classic science fiction terraforming themes make their appearance in Howard’s work as architect of the Alps. Sweet Dreams has many passages resonant of Robert Sheckley, Dimension of Miracles (1968), both in ideas and in structure. Both books are constructed round a series of wild discussions on the nature of the human condition. Howard has a job designing the Alps; in Dimension of Miracles, the principal character Carmody meets Maudsley, who may be God, and who terraformed Earth while simultaneously inventing science. The theme continues in Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with Slartibartfast, master terraformer of fiords. Howard is particularly proud of his creation of the ‘trademark for the Alps,’ the Matterhorn. When it is pointed out that the Matterhorn will be a creation which will kill people, Howard is appalled. He visits earth to check if people really will be so silly as to climb it. On earth he finds not only that they will, but also in general people accept the awful status quo, that they will die in accidents or from disease. (Dreams 100) Howard's inability to recognise the tragic irony of his new superhuman condition, that all his good intentions with his new-found powers may produce unanticipated evil, is touchingly naive. Howard is the innocent abroad on earth after he has seen Heaven, a twentieth century Candide looking at the horrors of the world afresh. Frayn's aims, however, are more savagely affectionate than Voltaire's. Howard returns to Heaven and produces his report on the human condition. It is an instant hit. As one character remarks, 'I think this is far and away the subtlest, most exciting ... zaniest, most realisable, wittiest, sexiest ... most lovable White Paper that I have ever set eyes on.' (Dreams 103). Howard vows to improve the terrible lot of people on earth, even if, as one character remarks in justification of the human condition, 'a terrible life is what these people enjoy.' (Dreams 100) He sells the film rights to his White Paper for an immense amount of money. Then he retreats to the simplicity of country life. He plans a people's revolution and achieves it by writing earnest letters to the more influential newspapers and thereby stirring up a groundswell of support. He gets to meet God, and is invited to becomes his off-sider. Until, of course, what happens is ... the book ends beautifully, in a way that invokes the 'Aha!' reaction in the reader, 'But of course, how obvious everything is when once it's happened.' A typical Frayn comic technique is to lead the reader along a path of readerly expectation and then neatly invert those expectations one after the other, and keep inverting them well past the point where the reader might expect a logical end. Consider the following account of how things could be otherwise, how the good marriage might be arranged in heaven. Howard has just eaten his favourite meal, and asks his wife Felicity to advise him on how best to act on the love he feels for another woman, Rose (later discovered to be the wife of his best friend Phil). Felicity, deeply understanding, suggests Howard should go ahead and 'Sweep her off her feet.' But Howard complains that he finds this difficult because his shirts have lost half their buttons, and it's all Felicity's fault: 'How can I go out and pursue a love affair wearing a shirt with no buttons on it?' The reader by now is well and truly on Felicity's side, but this is a Heaven for Howard. Felicity refuses to have a row. When Howard says to Felicity in the middle of the scene he is doing his best to create, 'You're finding this all very comical, aren't you?' the reader has an Aha! reaction. So this is what a domestic tiff would be like in Heaven, Howard's heaven, if not Felicity's. But that is what she is in Heaven for. She is there for him. Felicity kisses Howard's ear. He accuses her of aggression. Howard justifies his affair, because in Heaven he can easily find himself being twenty-two again, and he's having his affair with Rose before he met Felicity, so it's all right. Howard accuses Felicity of jealousy: 'No wonder I'm driven to go out and have affairs! Jealous scenes every time I come home!' Later, in bed, she apologises and says it's been her fault. He is generous, and shoulders some small blame. Then there's some fantastic sex: 'Meltingly, they eat each other, like two carnivorous ice-creams.’ (Dreams 53) If Sweet Dreams is a secular vision of happiness in a liberal democratic afterlife, A Landing on the Sun (1991) takes as its subject happiness in this life, in particular, in the highly unlikely shape of employment in the British Civil Service. The story is told from the point of view of Jessel, a serious young Civil Servant who is preparing an internal report on the mysterious death, some fifteen years earlier, of Summerchild, a Civil Servant connected with a defence project. Jessel is quietly methodical, a stickler for Departmental protocol. His mounting horror, as he uncovers what Summerchild was really up to, is brilliantly conveyed in a novel of sustained comic power. Frayn explains: What I really wanted to do was to write about happiness. But it's a very difficult subject. . . There's a kind of curse upon it, if you want to write about it without sentimentality or mawkishness. What I've tried to do is frame the subject and use a character [the narrator, Jessel] whose nature is not happy and explore his feelings about what he sees. (in Bryden, 'The most elusive substance' 10.) Jessel discovers that Summerchild had his very own landing on the sun, and left records behind in the unlikely form of Departmental memos and audio tapes. Summerchild had been set the task of defining 'quality of life' and allocated to a unit specially set up for the purpose, run by the Oxford philosopher Elizabeth Serafin. What is quality of life? They take as a point of departure Summerchild’s characteristically practical suggestion that it might have something to do with washing machines. Soon they move to questions of the metaphysics of desire and what it is to want what we want. Finally they tackle the whole question of happiness, which Serafin says, 'philosophers have gone round and about for so long. The idea of happiness is surely the sun at the centre of our conceptual planetary system - and has proved to be just as hard to look at directly. (Landing 88) However, looking at it directly is precisely what they do, and the analysis of happiness moves from the dry logic of linguistic philosophy to the discovery of love. On one level, the novel is firmly in realist mode (and what can be more realist than Departmental memos?) but what of the fantasy implicit in the title, A Landing on the Sun? The analysis of the dimensions of the moment of happiness, the hopelessness of the quest, yet its apparent achievement in this one instance - it is as fantastic and as dazzling an achievement as a landing on the sun. Happiness ‘was , after all, the substance we were trying to isolate in our little laboratory up there under the eaves.' (Landing 227) Near the end of his quest, Jessel discovers the truth: What they have shown, if it needed showing, is that happiness is like economics or heat in seawater. You can make the laws of economics work for short periods of time in small models cut off from the rest of the world, just as you can have a hot bath in the sun-warmed pools of sea-water left behind on the beach. But as soon as the neat economic model is reconnected with the unstructured chaos of human affairs, as soon as the tide returns, all gratifying predictivity breaks down, the hot bath disappears at once into the huge reserves of cold in the ocean deeps. Micro-happiness, yes; macro-happiness, I think not. (Landing 219) To find happiness is to find the small warm pool and to bask in the joy of the moment, while knowing the moment is transitory. It is the skill with which Frayn has Jessel report on this otherwise unsurprising finding, in the rediscovery of such present moments, now past, in the lives of Summerchild and Serafin, that brings the reader bitter-sweet pleasure. The reader knows, from the beginning of the story, that the landing on the sun has been and gone. The stage play Balmoral is based on the premise that the Socialist Revolution of 1917 happened in Britain, while Russia becomes capitalist. The play is set in 1937 at Balmoral, once a royal residence, now a state-run writers retreat. Balmoral is an alternative history, of a kind familiar to science fiction and fantasy readers. We are used to Hitler Wins! scenarios. But it is precisely the central premise of Balmoral that play-goers found too puzzling, according to Frayn. The science fiction and fantasy reader readily goes along with stories of a past that never happened. Part of the attraction is, I suspect, that is it a past that never happened - yet. That is, a past in which Britain had a workers' revolution in 1917 is a fiction, but it could well be a story of a possible future, a workers revolution of 2017. 'What if' is a powerful beginning in fantasy, and it seems to me should not, in itself, create insuperable problems in staging. Yet Balmoral 'was never much of a success', said Frayn: I see now, with hindsight, that it couldn't possibly work, because it's based upon an entirely abstract notion, a pure counterfactual, - a past that never happened, that never could happen . . . This is of course the subject of the play - the idea that things could be other than they are, the notion of imposing a fiction upon reality, of making the dead alive, of reading servitude as liberty - and of altering reality in the process. (File on Frayn 24) Yet it is hard to see why these ideas can't be made to work on stage, particularly by a writer as skilled as Frayn. Frayn puts the problem down to the nature of farce itself: 'Farce, I now realise, has to be rooted in immediate believable reality.’ It is asking the impossible to expect it also to deliver a subtle reading into the world of 'what might have been the case, and what might yet be the case.' (Frayn, Constructions 42) How would British writers have behaved in a Stalinist Britain? The writers are Warwick Deeping, Hugh Walpole and Enid Blyton (here a writer of 'curiously obscure erotic verse', not children's stories, which the state forbids her to write). What seems to have gone wrong is that their world is not realised enough. In one respect, world building is an aspect of fantasy that the theatre is superbly capable of suggesting. In Frayn's play Clouds (1976), Cuba is suggested by a backdrop of blue skies and clouds, upon which both cast and audience read their own meanings. In Balmoral the alternative universe of Communist Britain and capitalist Russia is sketched, but it seems as if the audience in the theatre was not given enough of the alternative world to make it plausible, not enough detail for the required suspension of belief. At least, this was the response of the critic Benedict Nightingale: 'What I, for one , wanted to know was what these pliant wordsmiths were actually writing, where and how they lived when not toiling at Balmoral, how they squared aspiration with achievement, conscience with compulsion.' (File on Frayn 25) Perhaps it was a novel-length idea in search of more words than would ever work theatrically. As Frayn commented, of Clouds, 'the ideas - the themes of perception . . . . It's better, in some ways, if people just see them as stories, funny or picaresque or whatever, so that the ideas are absorbed unconsciously.' (File on Frayn 19). The idea-as-character notion, time as measured by the clock, is used to great comic effect in the film Clockwise, starring John Cleese as Brian Stimpson, the time-obsessed headmaster of a comprehensive school. The film is framed by the hymn 'He who would valiant be/Gainst all disaster.’ Stimpson is a valiant Everyman, struggling to impose order upon disorder, intemperate with it, unable to tolerate ambiguity, let alone recognise it, far too wrapped up in his own affairs to pay attention to what anyone else is saying. He is a character set up for a fall, a hero whose quest fast becomes the fool's errand. All it takes is one lapse from full attention to detail, just once, from rigorously self-imposed order, one mistake of left for right. Stimpson desires to do 'right', but is soon shown to be someone who can't distinguish right from 'right', and in doing 'right' slides down the slippery slope to total ethical confusion. He ends up wanted by the police for a series of increasingly awful crimes, from phone vandalism to kidnapping. Like the movie Red Rock West, Clockwise records the relentless slide down the slippery slope where the consequences of an action which is 'right' or ethically justified on its own merits may lead to unethical actions that, at the time, seem to be quite logical extensions. But Frayn has the trick of being able to 'do it' without resorting to physical violence. No-one gets physically hurt in farce, even if the male principal characters usually lose their trousers. Yet there are those who will cheerfully watch the violence of Red Rock West but find John Cleese in his role as Brian Stimpson too painfully real to be borne. The embarrassment factor is too great. They cannot watch. Frayn writes: Desperation may eventually drive the characters to the most fantastic and improbable lengths, but the desperation has to be established first, and its source has to be the threat of an embarrassment so familiar that the audience's palms sweat in sympathy. (Frayn, Plays Two x) That is, the initial situation must seem real enough to the audience. Then, why should embarrassment be harder to take than on-screen bloodshed? Is it because there is also an element of violence in farce? The stage illusion of realism, Frayn continues, evokes a perverse kind of sympathy, the reverse of empathy: 'You refuse to let yourself identify with the characters ... You reject absolutely the idea that it could be you up there, so idiotically embarrassed.' This is the point where 'violence' enters. You reject the idea, yet you know it contains the kernel of truth. It is because you are there, at least in part: it is as if, in laughing at farce, 'You are like the bully who conceals the despised characteristic in himself by persecuting it in others.’ Frayn is also defining the point of transition from farce to comedy, where comedy is a special kind of laughing at the characters. In farce such as Frayn's magisterial Noises Off, the characters are there to be set up for various falls, and the audience knows it. Farce becomes comedy at the point at which the audience starts to sympathise with the characters in a human way, and thus laughing at their embarrassment becomes painful. Some viewers, myself included, see Clockwise as farce and laugh themselves silly at Stimpson's increasingly desperate fate. For others, Stimpson is a character with all too common human failings, perhaps aspects of themselves they may not much like, and when fate makes him a scapegoat they feel deep anxiety allied with embarrassment. These marked differences in audience perception relate to the ethics of satire. Some viewers find it more tragic than comic, the remorseless ingenuity of the ways in which Stimpson is set up in order to expose his weaknesses and deflate his pomposity. These viewers cannot laugh, or they laugh helplessly, but then feel guilt because they see themselves as taking a cruel pleasure in Stimpson's downfall. Satire is here understood as a different way of laughing, in that the characters are set up as such emblems of vice that their ultimate defeat brings pleasure. Viewers are not expected to empathise with characters in satire, but in Frayn's satire, we do. When Frayn was asked whether he though morality was important in comedy, he replied, 'It doesn't enter into my comedy at all. My comedy does not arise from any mockery of the bad, or mockery of the good.’ (DiGaetani, Search 80) Frayn locates himself as a writer of comedy, one who, in the tradition of Chekhov, finds in comedy the elements of tragedy. For example, Frayn says of Noises Off: The pain in that play is also embarrassment. I think embarrassment is a very deep emotion, something that many people fear. Noises Off is about embarrassment. It's about actors trying to fend off their appalling embarrassment of being unable to continue, and that is a problem in life for all human beings, of struggling on and trying to keep their act together. Many people have a great fear of not being able to go on with their lives. (DiGaetani, 78) In Act 1 of Noises Off, the audience is present at the dress rehearsal of a farce Nothing On, as presented by a touring company of hopelessly under-prepared actors. In Act 2, the action shifts backstage (now front of stage) to focus on ways in which the backstage chaos in the personal lives of the actors fast becomes part of the on-stage action. Act III shows some small order ultimately retrieved from chaos. Noises Off has been widely acclaimed as a wildly comic tour-de-force in ensemble playing, and a farce on the nature of farce itself. It has been an enormous theatrical success, the longest running production in the history of London's Savoy Theatre, a considerable feat in a theatre which premiered Gilbert and Sullivan. Farce is a parody of the idea of Providentialism, the idea that God has organised the world so that everything fits in. It is a satire on what man has made of free will. In farce, there is always an implied Calvinism, the pre-destination of fate in conflict with man's free will to make a mess of things. In farce, no one has a chance. It is more than Murphy's law. Everything the characters try to do will go wrong, and must go wrong. As chaos first descends in Noises Off, the theatre director, Lloyd comments: LLOYD I'm starting to know what God felt like when he sat out there in the darkness creating the world (Takes a pill) ... Very pleased he'd taken his Valium. BELINDA He had six days, of course. We've only got six hours. (Frayn, Plays Two 376) Lloyd is God to the cast, presiding over their disorder from the balcony, until the actors turn on him in the wildly frenetic climax to Act III and implicate him totally in the consequences of his actions. Free-will within a context of cosmic and comic determinism: this is Frayn's special gift to us. Some critics cannot see it. Writing about the Broadway opening of Benefactors, Robert Brustein took a stern view: Frayn . . . is continually manipulating his people into one artificial contrivance after another, since they exist to illustrate a pre-determined theme rather than to display a free and independent life of their own. (Gottlieb, 'Why this farce', 223.) Precisely. But it is human free will to make a mess of things that this particular critic totally misses. Others recognise that Noises Off satisfies in the way of the best farces by allowing disorder such a seemingly free run while maintaining unshakeable order.’ (Worth, 'Farce' 53) This is Frayn's special place in comedy. This is why God is so often a character. It is the God of Calvin, but God with a sense of humour, who is behind it all. Fantasy, however defined, is usually conceived as firmly in the fiction category. Impossible worlds must be fiction, surely. Yet some of Frayn's journalism falls into the category (if it falls into any category). From 1960-62 Frayn wrote a thrice weekly column for the daily newspaper, The Guardian, and from 1962-1969 a weekly column for the Sunday paper, The Observer. This was where I first encountered Frayn, when I was a student at Cambridge in the early 60's. For someone like myself whose previous exposure to daily papers had been The Queensland Times and The Courier Mail, Frayn was both a great read, and a key to understanding through his fantasy the weird reality with which I was surrounded, the world of the British class system and the early moves towards the European Common Market. He was depicting a largely male world, but at the time this was the norm, and women readers devised their own techniques for coping. Since Frayn was mostly sending up his male characters as amiable buffoons, I didn’t find a problem with it. Elsewhere, as in Constructions, he still assumes his reader is male, and this can seem a touch old-fashioned from the vantage point of 1997. The sixties marked the rise of the New Journalism in which many of the techniques of fiction were appropriated by feature writers to their own wild ends. Tom Wolfe, himself one of the main players, has compiled an anthology which shows how journalists of the sixties created a new style embracing techniques such as the interior monologue, direct reporting of dialogue, the switch to third person point of view (such as the 'Hectoring Narrator'), the recording of what Wolfe calls 'status life.’ This last device, says Wolfe, is 'the recording of everyday gestures, habits . . . aspects of the entire pattern of behaviour and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be.' (Wolfe, New Journalism, 47) Wolfe extolled these tricks as the new 'detailed realism.’ 'Detailed realism' in swift transition to detailed non-realism is where, in part, Frayn's columns sit, as British examples of the New Journalism. In an interview he said that his job with the Miscellany column for the Guardian was to write cool witty interviews with significant film directors passing through, but there were never enough film directors, so he started making up humorous paragraphs to fill. (Major Twentieth Century Writers 1062) Perhaps it is really just a small step from interviews with 'significant film directors' to writing fantasy. Recall Frayn's comment on 'reality breaking surface as an extension of the fantasy within. The people around us are like mountain tops rising from a sea of cloud' (Frayn, Constructions 55). Frayn plunges into the clouds and in so doing creates the new genre of Frayntasy. Many of these sixties pieces read just as brightly today. The trick of it, in Frayn, is in the detail he selects from which to extrapolate to weird ends. A classic Frayn is 'Fog-like sensations', a series of numbered meditations in the style of Wittgenstein which took off from an official report on fog (Frayn, Outskirts 87). The reason there are so many motorway crashes in fog, it was said, was that the authorities fail to provide illuminated signs warning that it was foggy. Frayn articulates this particular problem of perception: '697 ... He sees the fog but he does not perceive its fogginess', and, '701 ... surely the best guarantee I can have that the fog is fog is if I fail to see the sign saying 'fog ' because of the fog.' Extrapolation from point of view is another technique of the New Journalism. God's point of view is a frequent Frayn conceit God created the universe in a week, but what next? What is the sequel? Frayn gives us 'Week Two' in which God discovers that he has accidentally created the predator: 'the fowl of the air was getting eaten by the beasts of the earth . . . and some of the creeping things were creeping right off the earth, and installing themselves in various warm corners of the beasts and fowls' (Frayn, Beep 9). It's as if God has invited all creation to a suburban dinner party, and here we all are, the guests, behaving badly and making a mess of his best laid plans. To Paul Davies, the mind of God is the mind of the mathematical physicist. Frayn's version has him more a sociologist's God, a cosmic worrier quietly exasperated at the messy unanticipated human consequences of all his good intentions. Not all the columns survive the transition to book form. Sometimes, in Speak after the Beep there are traces of laboured 'old fogeydom' as in the worst of Punch. Forgiving Frayn his occasional lapses is easy: his failures spring from an excess of good ideas, as in 'The Magic Mobile.’ What might be a sharp satire on the mythic journey has too many other targets, opera and air travel among them. The Traveller takes brave hold of his mobile phone and with its help survives trail by ordeal, the rituals of airline embarkation. The quest is from darkness to light, through the narrow winding corridor to the entrance of a new and better world where heavenly Musak plays (Beep 125). In one thousand words, Frayn travesties the large theme of the secularisation of myth, from tragedy, to ritual social event, to comedy, to irony. A tighter and more effective piece is 'Our pleasure, Captain.’ Here an aircraft passenger who has heard one too many ritual announcements, 'Welcome aboard, this is your Captain speaking ', gets to his feet and responds with a speech of his own, in the best 'vote of thanks' tradition. (Beep 135) The germs of ideas later expanded to book or play length form are to be found in Constructions, a series of numbered meditations in the tradition of Pascal's Pensees and Wittgenstein's Investigations, but funnier. From Pascal, Frayn quotes: 105 . . . Thus the whole of life runs past. A man seeks repose by battling against obstacles; and these surmounted, repose becomes unendurable. Hence Sweet Dreams. 48. Each of us develops a style - another attempt to order the chaos. Not by discovering an order in it, but by imposing one upon it, like a tank laying its own tracks across the wilderness. There is the germ which was to grow into the novel The Trick of It (1989), Frayn's first novel since 1973. Frayn said he suffered 'a kind of loss of voice' as a novelist for these sixteen years. Malcolm Page commented that A Very Private Life and Sweet Dreams were such accomplished satiric fantasies that 'Perhaps because Frayn has mastered his unusual form of the fable in these two books, he has been unable to go any further as a novelist.' (Page, Dictionary of Literary Biography 14 337) Fortunately the writer Frayn proved the critic Page wrong. The Trick of It is another fable, this one in realist mode. It is a fable of what the analytic mind does to the creative mind when it seeks to analyse, undermine and ultimately destroy the object of its study. The Trick of It takes the form of letters from a critic and academic to his friend in Australia, recounting the story of his admiration for the writer whom he refers to as JL, his meeting with her, his courtship, marriage and attempts to order her creative life. JL is a successful novelist, a writer who has 'the trick of it', the tricks of the writing trade. 'A man dominates his environment by establishing a unifying principle, himself.’ (Frayn, Constructions 48) In establishing this principle, and placing himself firmly in the writer's life, the critic creates the conditions under which the writer begins to doubt herself. In this novel of brilliantly reflexive irony, fact is disguised as fiction, and fiction is made to look like fact. (Lodge, The Art of Fiction 24) Frayn's fictional newspaper offices are worlds long gone, belonging as they do to the era before electronic publication and global media conglomerates. His journalists still use manual typewriters, apart from Erskine Morris in Towards the End of the Morning, but he is the abrasive face of the new media era. Morris goes out at lunchtime on his first day at work and buys himself an electric portable typewriter from a shop. 'If you pay schedule D,' Morris explains to his dumbfounded colleagues, who have never heard of such a thing as buying your own typewriter, 'It's tax-deductible.' (Frayn, Morning 189). Frayn's worlds are for the most part worlds of men at work, in a leisurely gentlemanly kind of fashion, bumbling around, not fully in control of their lives. Wives are the women men live with when not at work. Work is the province of a bumbling mateship, home the province of bumbling matrimony, fondly evoked. Are these worlds fantasy worlds? The short answer is, No. Or yes, but only in the large and not very helpful sense that all fiction is fantasy. Yet there is still something there I want to tease out, about the notion of constructing reality. Frayn writes: 'The objects around us are the typeface in which we see printed deeper messages, stories centring on ourselves as hero, martyr, appetite. It takes a special eye to look at a page of type and not see cherubim and seraphim but serifs and spacing.' (Frayn, Constructions 58). The everyday is thus a fantastic construction placed upon the natural world. Indeed, Frayn argues, to see the natural world naturalistically, as a scientist does, requires special training. The primacy of the fantastic is a consistent theme in Frayn's work, ' the reality breaking surface as an extension of the fantasy within.' There is a gentle aspect to Frayn's satire. He lacks Swift's 'savage indignation.' Although his target is often the bureaucratic elite and the establishment, he writes from within that own world, and with a broad sympathy for it. He doesn't want to question its values too deeply. He will show its work as often pointless, he will show its dreams dissolving into fantasy, but he's not radical enough to imagine the world that might replace this one. It may be because he is fluent in Russian and knows Russia well that he was protected, in the Cold War years, against a naive admiration of the Soviet system, aware that many of the dreams of the left, as of the right, were based on illusion. Yet, without savagery, he is still subversive. His Guardian columns mocked the new breed of capitalist entrepreneurs then beginning the process of undermining the bureaucratic state. In Sweet Dreams, in one of Howard's attempts at reform, he decides that the people must seize power and create their own universe: And men must be free to create themselves. This is the keystone of his conception. . . . Each man will decide for himself how may arms and legs he wants, and whether he wants white skin of black skin, or whether he'd prefer to be covered in furnishing fabric, or mink. A people's world and a people's people. (Dreams 125) The satirist in Frayn just can't help it. He shares in the socialist critique of capitalism, but finds deep flaws in left-wing utopianism. Frayn is also well known for his translations from the Russian and his restaging of the plays of Anton Chekhov. Although Frayn shares Chekhov's sense of irony and his desire to expose the self-deluding fantasies of the governing class, he lacks Chekhov's anger at the oppressiveness of provincial life and the ways in which lives are wasted in triviality. Instead Frayn finds amusement in such predicaments, as one might expect from someone who writes from Moscow rather than the provinces. Frayn is also a writer who takes happiness as one of his large and important themes, and who points to the intense pleasures in small suburban things. What I really like about Frayn above all else, the more I examine his work as a writer wanting to know his 'trick of it', is his lack of portentousness. His prose style is deceptively simple, concealing the craft it takes to make it so. Frayn doesn't claim to have the answers. Yet his work shows that satire rises above the charge often levelled at it of using mockery in defence of a conservative status quo. Frayn's satire always builds on subjunctivities, the notion that 'things could be otherwise.’ A Very Private Life is the subjunctivity of the cautionary dystopia, in that it portrays a series of events, extrapolated from the power and cowardice of privilege, which have not happened - yet. Constructions is a series of meditations on the question of subjunctivity. One aphorism suggests the genesis of Balmoral: 'to know what is the case, in any meaningful sense, one also must have some idea in one's head of what is not the case, of what it is excluding.’ (Frayn, Constructions 44). Samuel Delany and Joanna Russ analyse fantasy along similar lines: Fantasy . . . embodies a 'negative subjunctivity' - that is fantasy is fantasy because it contravenes the real and violates it. The actual world is constantly implicit in fantasy, by negation. (Russ, To Write 16). Frayn creates Balmoral: Hence one has an idea of Britain and the Britons - but in having that idea, there is also a hazy cloud of excluded possibilities in which Britons are seen to be gesticulating excitedly, perhaps, or voting communist. (Frayn, Constructions 44) What is not the case, discontinuity, provides Frayn's base for comedy. Sweet Dreams provides many such instances of 'negative subjunctivity.’ Howard, at home and with Felicity is listening to his six-year son Matthew read from a Janet and John book, On We Plod. But 'Things could be otherwise', and what might be a mind-deadening chore swiftly becomes fascinating. As Howard listens he is delighted to find that On We Plod is a son's affectionate commentary on his father's life, for Matthew not only wrote the book himself, his classmates got it published. ( Dreams 48 ) If only. Frayn is a seriously funny writer, as one of his critics commented. Seriously playful, too, when he takes on Wittgenstein, no less: The first proposition of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus [Wittgenstein]- "The world is everything that is the case” - is the consummation of the empirical tradition in philosophy. The Tractatus Radico-Philosophicus, when it comes to be written will commence: 'The world is everything that might be made to be the case. (Frayn, Constructions 47) Hence Balmoral as a writers retreat in a communist Britain. Frayn also possesses a madly comic futurist vision in which some of the absurdities he extrapolates from current trends in his early pieces have since come to pass. He has a sharp eye for that aspect of today's absurdity which become tomorrow's accepted fact of life. He predicted the world of virtual reality and digital visual communication long before the terms were coined. That humans should turn their ethical machines into prize fighters and place bets on the outcome is an example of Frayn's marvellous ability to extrapolate to one absurd, yet also inherently plausible outcome of automation. Hugh Rowe (Frayn, Tin Men 42) works on a computer program to run all the bingo games in the country simultaneously from one central computer; how swiftly yesterday's wild suggestion becomes today's social reality. The latest gaming technology in Australia is a game called MegaBucks where external gaming machines will be linked to a centralised terminal, and players in Sydney and Melbourne will play for the same jackpot (The Age, 15.1.1997). Joanna Russ comments: One's reaction [to satire] is more often; this is ridiculous, this is impossible. But the material that provokes such a reaction is in fact only an exaggeration (if the satire is a good one) of what the reader already believes in, for the very good reason that it already exists in the actual world. (Russ, To Write 19) There is a visionary quality to some of Frayn's madly farcical pronouncements, as if the secret of life is some terrible joke in which we are all hopelessly enmeshed, falling about laughing while yet another thunderbolt falls from the skies, and yet another on-stage character loses his trousers for an oh-so-plausible if totally impossible reason (the ultimate embarrassment fantasy of every man, it seems, though not of every woman). In the bibliography, I have listed Frayn's major dramatic and non-dramatic writings, only a fraction of which could be termed 'fantasy', however generously fantasy is defined. I have included works in which an element of subjunctivity appears, articulated as ‘things could be otherwise’, albeit not as extravagantly as the voracious reader of fantasy might normally expect. This essay has been a survey of just one particular aspect of Frayn's prolific output, and the reader who wants to venture further will find considerable Fraynian riches. If what I have written inspires the fantasy enthusiast to seek Frayn out, she will not be disappointed. There she will find richly envisioned other worlds, worlds which are not quite our world yet not quite alien.
Footnotes [i] God is gendered male, and the philosopher reflecting on his experience is equally assumed male. Women readers must bear with it, knowing this, until recently, was the commonly accepted fashion.
Bibliography
A. Works by Frayn Frayn, Michael, "Balmoral", in Plays : Two. Methuen,
1991.
B. Criticism, secondary sources, etc Bryden, Ronald, "The most Elusive Substance on Earth", New
York Times Book Review. Feb 16, 1992. p. 10.
© Rosaleen Love 1997
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