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Spies by Michael Frayn
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James Persechino
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Summary

James Persechino
1yr
Summary
Behind its rather flat title, Michael Frayn's new novel is rather a beautiful book. Stephen Wheatley looks back in old age, and from a different country, on the wartime summer when everything changed for him, in the quiet suburb where he lived with his family. The 'spies' of the title are the German agents whom boyish imagination sees round every corner, but the term applies just as well to Stephen himself and his best (if not only) friend, Keith Hayward, once they get it into their heads to watch people's movements. 

Events in the Close don't bear close examination, even if the secrets the boys uncover, without quite understanding them, are relatively mundane. No less painful for that. 



The key to the book's success is Frayn's decision to respect young Stephen's point of view without staking everything on recreating it. Stephen's older self frets over the past which is the boy's present, without claiming authority over it. The sheer foreignness of childhood requires that he use the third person as often as the first ('I watch him emerge from the warped front door, still cramming food into his mouth from tea'). Physical sensations - the feel of a tumbler of lemon barley, the taste of chocolate spread - survive better in memory than past states of mind. This can seem a rather perverse piece of construction, setting up a double perspective and then muffling it, but its great virtue is that it shuts out whimsy. 

Another strategic move is not to specify Stephen's age (until the end of the book, when Keith's going to boarding school more or less pins it down). Seen from the next century, no one age seems to be able to accommodate so much serious play, such extremes of information and ignorance - to account for a boy expected to know the ablative of quis and the principal exports of Canada, but having no inkling that a boy and a girl unsupervised might experiment not just with cigarettes but with kisses. This is innocence with a vengeance. This is childhood before market forces got to work on it. 

As such, it is full of tender, latent comedy, but Frayn fights the impulse to play things for laughs. His previous novel, Headlong , was marred by an insistent humorousness at odds with a dark story, but here he refrains from the jokes that come so easily to him. That he is tempted is shown by some suppressed by play on the name of the definitive shrub of suburbia. Keith, whose spelling is not his strong point, writes 'Privet', meaning 'private', near their favourite hide, which is, as it happens, surrounded by privet.
Stephen, in conversation with a Girl, naturally doesn't dare admit his ignorance of the word, and concludes it means something dirty, specifically the outside lavatories of the poor. Privet in the book, along with Stephen's other fears (germs and bosoms), stays just the right side of the dividing line between leitmotiv and running gag. 
Behind the stock response triggered by its name, privet is a strange shrub with a vulgar reek in high summer. Frayn uses it as an emblem of a way of life with plenty of hidden strangeness, a rawness under the tranquillity: 'Muddy tracks were adopted and drained, tarred and gravelled, so that the wives could push their high-sprung perambulators to the shops without jolting their babies awake, and the husbands could walk dryshod in their city shoes to the station each morning and dryshod back at night. The raw earth and bare bricks of the building plots were softened by a green screen that grew as Stephen grew, scarcely further ahead of him in life than his elder brother.' The suburb is a 'sudden new colony' imposed on earlier patterns of life, and the boys' need to know takes them beyond the edges of this paradoxical settlement. 
Keith is a posh only child, Stephen a younger brother ashamed of his family. The relationship between the two is lightly but strongly drawn, like all the characterisation in this economical book: for Stephen, 'things start as a game, and then they turn into a test, which I fail'. If he has a dim sense of Keith's need of him, it can only be that 'without me there's no one for him to be braver than'. 

 Spies works as a mystery, as a war story and as a coming-of-age narrative. The only thing it can't quite be, despite its author's intellectual background, is a work of philosophy. There are some slightly strained passages, ponderings with a whiff of the seminar, rather too methodical for the context: 'I'm not sure, now the question's been raised, if I really understand even what it means to understand something.' 

At the end of the book, there are a couple of references which go beyond philosophy, almost into mysticism, about things that must never be known. Again, this seems unjustified by the story, in which individual patches of knowledge and ignorance are fitted into a fully coherent pattern. In fact, the whole underlying principle of the book's construction is that there is no such single thing as knowing, an on/off state like a light switch. Adults and children, males and females, make different accommodations with their own knowings and unknowings. Girls in particular (nice touch in a reconfigured boys' adventure story) seem to have an early mental puberty. They grasp truths immediately, leaving boys lamely deducing in their wake. 

 

📎 Comment on the features of Frayn's narrative style in 'Spies'?

Anonymous
9mo
Comment on the features of Frayn's narrative style in 'Spies'?
Comment on the features of Frayn's narrative style in 'Spies'?
PLAN: Introduction: -uses different styles -persona shifts (first to third) -intrusive narration -memory issues -present to describe ...
charlottespies


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James Persechino
1yr
Website to help with essay writing 
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How does the writer use language to describe the narrator's trail of thought?

James Persechino
1yr
How does the writer use language to describe the narrator's trail of thought? 
Frayn presents the narrator as confused. ( disturbed, perplexed, conflicted) This is evident whilst the narrator is walking past the gardens as he notices a 'familiar breath of sweetness' Here, he is disturbed by a scent that takes him back to his past. The use of ' familiar' indicates that the narrator has smelt this before and it reminds him of his days gone by. The reader is drawn in and taken back to the narrator's past with him to work out it is that has done this to him. The connotations of 'Sweetness' alludes to a pleasurable experience but this is then contradicted by the narrator when he conveys to the reader that this scent has in fact taken him back to a 'frightening, half-understood promise of life.' The theme of nostalgia and disturbing childhood memories is foreshadowed by the narrator as we are transported back to his earliest childhood which is clearly an unpleasant experience. 
 

S.W.A.G

James Persechino
1yr
S.W.A.G
Single word analysis glory
Focus on the associations/connotations
How does your quote link to another point?
Can you spot the techniques used?
Can you analyse the effect on the reader? What is the writer's intention?
 

S.W.E.A.T.Y Paragraphs

James Persechino
1yr
S.W.E.A.T.Y Paragraphs 
Statement- Your short point that relates to the question
Weave- Your build up to your quote- what is happening? 
Evidence- Your short quote- direct from the text- embedded using 'evidence'
Analysis- Show your understanding of the quote- What does it mean? What is happening? 
Technique- Which language technique has been used? What is the effect on the audience? What is the writer's intention? How does this relate to the context/theme? What does it show about the character? 
Yes- it relates to the question

 

Characters

James Persechino
9mo
Characters
Stephen Wheatley 
Keith Hayward 
Barbara Berrill 
Mrs Hayward 
Mr Hayward 
Mr Wheatley 
Uncle Peter 
Auntie Dee 

 

Past Exam Questions

James Persechino
9mo
Past Exam Questions
Explore the ways Frayn presents uncertainty and threat during war time 
Consider the ways Frayn presents Keith’s mother 
Explore the changing relationship between Stephen and Keith 
Explore how Frayn presents there being "something not quite right" about Stephen's family 

 

example essay

James Persechino
1yr
example essay 
 Comment on the features of Frayn's narrative style in 'Spies'?
PLAN:
 

Introduction: -uses different styles -persona shifts (first to third) -intrusive narration     -memory issues -present to describe past
PARA 1: Persona shifts -examples -impact on novel
PARA 2: Intrusive narration 
PARA 3: Memory issues
PARA 4: Present tense to describe the past
PARA 5: Conclusion

 ESSAY:
 
 In this novel, Michael Frayn uses a vast range of narrative styles - although some are more prominent than others. For example, the majority of the novel features an intrusive narrator and the narration is generally in the first person.
 
 There are frequent shifts throughout the novel between the first and the third person. This is used to show the reader which Stephen is speaking, the first person is used to show Stephen's recollections of past events, whereas the third person is used to show Stephen's present actions, but in the past. An example of the first person tense is 
 "I think of scuffling drearily with Norman, and doing it merely to conceal from him that I've really left such childish time-wasting far behind me.".
 This sentence shows the actions that Stephen took at the time, and his thoughts on these actions now he's recalling them; for example at the time Stephen would not have analysed his reasoning for playing with Norman. An example of the third person tense is
 "So now Keith and Stephen are standing in the hall, amidst the darkness of the panelling and the gleam of the silver and the delicate chiming of the clocks, deciding what they're going to do this afternoon.".
 The fact that the narrator references himself by his name and uses the words "this afternoon" shows the reader that the time reference is the 1940s, present day. At this point, Stephen is not having a recollection. 
 
 The narrator is quite intrusive and makes frequent interjections into the sequence of narration. Regularly throughout the novel the intrusions are by means of rhetorical questions, this allows the reader to consider the questions briefly - before Stephen goes on to answer them, either directly or through the narration of the story. An example of these types of rhetorical questions is
 "What do we see from our vantage point in the meantime?".
 This shows Stephen looking back upon the events and recalling what happened. The use of intrusion also benefits the changes from first to third person, due to means of recollection. 
 
 A key theme running throughout the novel is memory and doubt. When Stephen is writing in the first person, he regularly doubts his memory. This makes his narration unreliable, and the reader begins to doubt everything substantial that he says. Also, the fact that Stephen's memory's are perceived through the eyes of a child makes them unreliable, also. A child's view on the world and it's events is regularly blurred, they can over and under exaggerate certain things - this is something that the reader is always aware of whilst reading Spies. An example of Stephen openly showing the reader his lack of trust in his own memory is in Chapter 3,
 "No, the policeman was earlier, before the story began ... On the other hand he couldn't have come until Mrs Berrill had seen the intruder...".
 The use of ellipsis also shows the reader Stephen's stream of consciousness, which is something that happens frequently throughout the novel. 
 
 Stephen also uses the present tense to describe the past, which is a very effective technique because it shows the reader that in Stephen's mind, he really is back in wartime Britain. This, in some respects, makes the narration more reliable because Stephen truly believes the story he is reciting to the reader. 
 
 In Conclusion, Frayn uses a broad range of narrative techniques to create the voice of Stephen in Spies.
 


 

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James Persechino
1yr
Useful Website 
 Revision:Spies by michael frayn - The Student Room
Revision:Spies by michael frayn - The Student Room
TSR Wiki > Study Help > Subjects and Revision > Revision Notes > English > Spies by Michael Frayn "The third week of June, and there it is again: the same almost embarrassingly familiar breath of sweetness that comes every year about this time."
the student room


add

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Comment on the features of Frayn's narrative style in 'Spies'?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
PLAN: Introduction: -uses different styles -persona shifts (first to third) -intrusive narration -memory issues -present to describe ...

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
MarkedbyTeachers.com Coursework, Essay & Homework assistance including assignments fully Marked by Teachers and Peers. Get the best results here.

# data[].attributes.headline
How does the writer use language to describe the narrator's trail of thought? 

# data[].attributes.subject
How does the writer use language to describe the narrator's trail of thought? 

# data[].attributes.body
Frayn presents the narrator as confused. ( disturbed, perplexed, conflicted) This is evident whilst the narrator is walking past the gardens as he notices a 'familiar breath of sweetness' Here, he is disturbed by a scent that takes him back to his past. The use of ' familiar' indicates that the narrator has smelt this before and it reminds him of his days gone by. The reader is drawn in and taken back to the narrator's past with him to work out it is that has done this to him. The connotations of 'Sweetness' alludes to a pleasurable experience but this is then contradicted by the narrator when he conveys to the reader that this scent has in fact taken him back to a 'frightening, half-understood promise of life.' The theme of nostalgia and disturbing childhood memories is foreshadowed by the narrator as we are transported back to his earliest childhood which is clearly an unpleasant experience.

# data[].attributes.body
Single word analysis glory
Focus on the associations/connotations
How does your quote link to another point?
Can you spot the techniques used?
Can you analyse the effect on the reader? What is the writer's intention?

# data[].attributes.body
Statement- Your short point that relates to the question
Weave- Your build up to your quote- what is happening?
Evidence- Your short quote- direct from the text- embedded using 'evidence'
Analysis- Show your understanding of the quote- What does it mean? What is happening?
Technique- Which language technique has been used? What is the effect on the audience? What is the writer's intention? How does this relate to the context/theme? What does it show about the character?
Yes- it relates to the question

# data[].attributes.body
Stephen Wheatley

Keith Hayward

Barbara Berrill

Mrs Hayward

Mr Hayward

Mr Wheatley

Uncle Peter

Auntie Dee

# data[].attributes.body
Explore the ways Frayn presents uncertainty and threat during war time

Consider the ways Frayn presents Keith’s mother

Explore the changing relationship between Stephen and Keith

Explore how Frayn presents there being "something not quite right" about Stephen's family

# data[].attributes.body
Comment on the features of Frayn's narrative style in 'Spies'?

PLAN:

Introduction: -uses different styles -persona shifts (first to third) -intrusive narration     -memory issues -present to describe past

PARA 1: Persona shifts -examples -impact on novel

PARA 2: Intrusive narration

PARA 3: Memory issues

PARA 4: Present tense to describe the past

PARA 5: Conclusion

ESSAY:

In this novel, Michael Frayn uses a vast range of narrative styles - although some are more prominent than others. For example, the majority of the novel features an intrusive narrator and the narration is generally in the first person.

There are frequent shifts throughout the novel between the first and the third person. This is used to show the reader which Stephen is speaking, the first person is used to show Stephen's recollections of past events, whereas the third person is used to show Stephen's present actions, but in the past. An example of the first person tense is
"I think of scuffling drearily with Norman, and doing it merely to conceal from him that I've really left such childish time-wasting far behind me.".
This sentence shows the actions that Stephen took at the time, and his thoughts on these actions now he's recalling them; for example at the time Stephen would not have analysed his reasoning for playing with Norman. An example of the third person tense is
"So now Keith and Stephen are standing in the hall, amidst the darkness of the panelling and the gleam of the silver and the delicate chiming of the clocks, deciding what they're going to do this afternoon.".
The fact that the narrator references himself by his name and uses the words "this afternoon" shows the reader that the time reference is the 1940s, present day. At this point, Stephen is not having a recollection.

The narrator is quite intrusive and makes frequent interjections into the sequence of narration. Regularly throughout the novel the intrusions are by means of rhetorical questions, this allows the reader to consider the questions briefly - before Stephen goes on to answer them, either directly or through the narration of the story. An example of these types of rhetorical questions is
"What do we see from our vantage point in the meantime?".
This shows Stephen looking back upon the events and recalling what happened. The use of intrusion also benefits the changes from first to third person, due to means of recollection.

A key theme running throughout the novel is memory and doubt. When Stephen is writing in the first person, he regularly doubts his memory. This makes his narration unreliable, and the reader begins to doubt everything substantial that he says. Also, the fact that Stephen's memory's are perceived through the eyes of a child makes them unreliable, also. A child's view on the world and it's events is regularly blurred, they can over and under exaggerate certain things - this is something that the reader is always aware of whilst reading Spies. An example of Stephen openly showing the reader his lack of trust in his own memory is in Chapter 3,
"No, the policeman was earlier, before the story began ... On the other hand he couldn't have come until Mrs Berrill had seen the intruder...".
The use of ellipsis also shows the reader Stephen's stream of consciousness, which is something that happens frequently throughout the novel.

Stephen also uses the present tense to describe the past, which is a very effective technique because it shows the reader that in Stephen's mind, he really is back in wartime Britain. This, in some respects, makes the narration more reliable because Stephen truly believes the story he is reciting to the reader.

In Conclusion, Frayn uses a broad range of narrative techniques to create the voice of Stephen in Spies.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Revision:Spies by Michael Frayn | The Student Room

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"The third week of June, and there it is again: the same almost embarrassingly familiar breath of sweetness that comes every year about this time.""Glimpse of different things flash into my mind, in random sequence, and are gone.

# data[].attributes.body
Behind its rather flat title, Michael Frayn's new novel is rather a beautiful book. Stephen Wheatley looks back in old age, and from a different country, on the wartime summer when everything changed for him, in the quiet suburb where he lived with his family. The 'spies' of the title are the German agents whom boyish imagination sees round every corner, but the term applies just as well to Stephen himself and his best (if not only) friend, Keith Hayward, once they get it into their heads to watch people's movements.

Events in the Close don't bear close examination, even if the secrets the boys uncover, without quite understanding them, are relatively mundane. No less painful for that.

The key to the book's success is Frayn's decision to respect young Stephen's point of view without staking everything on recreating it. Stephen's older self frets over the past which is the boy's present, without claiming authority over it. The sheer foreignness of childhood requires that he use the third person as often as the first ('I watch him emerge from the warped front door, still cramming food into his mouth from tea'). Physical sensations - the feel of a tumbler of lemon barley, the taste of chocolate spread - survive better in memory than past states of mind. This can seem a rather perverse piece of construction, setting up a double perspective and then muffling it, but its great virtue is that it shuts out whimsy.

Another strategic move is not to specify Stephen's age (until the end of the book, when Keith's going to boarding school more or less pins it down). Seen from the next century, no one age seems to be able to accommodate so much serious play, such extremes of information and ignorance - to account for a boy expected to know the ablative of quis and the principal exports of Canada, but having no inkling that a boy and a girl unsupervised might experiment not just with cigarettes but with kisses. This is innocence with a vengeance. This is childhood before market forces got to work on it.

As such, it is full of tender, latent comedy, but Frayn fights the impulse to play things for laughs. His previous novel, Headlong , was marred by an insistent humorousness at odds with a dark story, but here he refrains from the jokes that come so easily to him. That he is tempted is shown by some suppressed by play on the name of the definitive shrub of suburbia. Keith, whose spelling is not his strong point, writes 'Privet', meaning 'private', near their favourite hide, which is, as it happens, surrounded by privet.

Stephen, in conversation with a Girl, naturally doesn't dare admit his ignorance of the word, and concludes it means something dirty, specifically the outside lavatories of the poor. Privet in the book, along with Stephen's other fears (germs and bosoms), stays just the right side of the dividing line between leitmotiv and running gag.

Behind the stock response triggered by its name, privet is a strange shrub with a vulgar reek in high summer. Frayn uses it as an emblem of a way of life with plenty of hidden strangeness, a rawness under the tranquillity: 'Muddy tracks were adopted and drained, tarred and gravelled, so that the wives could push their high-sprung perambulators to the shops without jolting their babies awake, and the husbands could walk dryshod in their city shoes to the station each morning and dryshod back at night. The raw earth and bare bricks of the building plots were softened by a green screen that grew as Stephen grew, scarcely further ahead of him in life than his elder brother.' The suburb is a 'sudden new colony' imposed on earlier patterns of life, and the boys' need to know takes them beyond the edges of this paradoxical settlement.

Keith is a posh only child, Stephen a younger brother ashamed of his family. The relationship between the two is lightly but strongly drawn, like all the characterisation in this economical book: for Stephen, 'things start as a game, and then they turn into a test, which I fail'. If he has a dim sense of Keith's need of him, it can only be that 'without me there's no one for him to be braver than'.

Spies works as a mystery, as a war story and as a coming-of-age narrative. The only thing it can't quite be, despite its author's intellectual background, is a work of philosophy. There are some slightly strained passages, ponderings with a whiff of the seminar, rather too methodical for the context: 'I'm not sure, now the question's been raised, if I really understand even what it means to understand something.'

At the end of the book, there are a couple of references which go beyond philosophy, almost into mysticism, about things that must never be known. Again, this seems unjustified by the story, in which individual patches of knowledge and ignorance are fitted into a fully coherent pattern. In fact, the whole underlying principle of the book's construction is that there is no such single thing as knowing, an on/off state like a light switch. Adults and children, males and females, make different accommodations with their own knowings and unknowings. Girls in particular (nice touch in a reconfigured boys' adventure story) seem to have an early mental puberty. They grasp truths immediately, leaving boys lamely deducing in their wake.