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. 

PLAN:
 

 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.