British writer Michael Frayn has been in a World War II state of mind. His Tony-winning play Copenhagen (which continues at Boston’s Colonial Theatre through this Sunday, May 19) speculates on a still-mysterious 1941 meeting between physicist Werner Heisenberg, head of Hitler’s atomic-research team, and his Danish mentor, Niels Bohr, in the city of the title. And Frayn’s haunting new novel is a long-repressed mystery, laden with irony, that’s triggered when an elderly man revisits the London suburb where he was a pubescent boy at the height of the war. Here he watches in his mind’s eye his clueless 10-year-old self become involved in an increasingly urgent child’s game that bears deadly, if fuzzy, fruit.
Stephen Wheatley, as the " undersized boy with the teapot ears " was called, is now a sexagenarian translator of German transformer manuals living on the Continent. Every spring, however, he is disturbed by a vulgar floral smell that he cannot identify but that is " whispering to me of something secret, of some dark and unsettling thing at the back of my mind. " At last he gets on a plane, then on a train, and returns to the insular, then-uncompleted suburb where his boyhood world consisted of a 14-house circle called the Close, which bordered on a dripping and sinister tangle of rural squalor the suburb was in the midst of usurping. There, at first with an almost dispassionate curiosity, he breathes in " the same old quiet sweet dull ordinariness " that, for a brief time, burst into something as overpowering as the sweet, coarse reek of flowering privet that, like some olfactory madeleine, brings it all back.
As he confronts the old neighborhood, no longer a prim colony backed up against " the unreconstructed world, " the past comes back to the man who was Stephen not as narrative but as " a collection of vivid particulars. " The not-altogether-swift Stephen is a born follower, vaguely embarrassed by his own ordinary family and awed by the gleamingly orderly world in which his friend Keith Hayward exists, with a serenely coming-and-going mother and chipper authoritarian dad. Mr. Hayward, when he isn’t putting his garage into rigid order while " whistling, whistling, whistling, " sharpens the bayonet with which he ran through five Germans in the Great War and calls his son " old bean " while, with a tight-lipped smile, threatening to cane him. In this sunny sadist Frayn creates, without a lurid stroke, a monster so banally terrifying as to suggest that not all Nazis were on the Axis side.
The war manifests itself not much, except in the nightly blackout and the " unclaimed territory left after Miss Durant’s house was gutted by a stray German incendiary bomb. " It is there that Keith and Stephen, when they aren’t building a railroad or oiling a bicycle, set up camp in the hollowed-out privet hedge. It’s all very Leave It to Beaver, blackout notwithstanding, until Keith utters the six words that change everything. " ‘My mother,’ he said reflectively, almost regretfully, ‘is a German spy.’ " Soon the boys are reading her diary, misinterpreting the X’s recorded each month " at the dark of the moon, " and following her on errands that do in fact mask secret activities. What starts as an imaginative, wryly recounted kids’ adventure intrudes on a war- and adultery-related adult catastrophe in the making.
Frayn is one of few writers to have achieved top-drawer success as both a dramatist and a novelist. His plays include, in addition to Copenhagen, the deliriously anarchic yet precisely calibrated backstage farce Noises Off. And his 1999 novel Headlong was a Booker Prize finalist. What is so accomplished about Spies, at once a wartime mystery and a coming-of-age story, is the way in which he tells an affecting story of boyhood angst while squeezing exquisite irony over it like honey from a comb. Take the sexy-smelling privet. No-spelling-bee-candidate Keith, intending to convey " keep out, " scrawls the word " privet " on a tile he affixes to the entrance to his and Stephen’s hideaway in the hedge. When challenged as to the word’s meaning by 11-year-old sexual predator Barbara Berrill, Stephen gets it confused with " privy, " in which context it keeps cropping up. " Bosoms and privets " are things not to be spoken of by an insecure boy on the brink of adolescence who’s fascinated by the former and distressed by the " raggedy children " of the Lanes beyond the Close who are forced to do their business in the latter.
The tying up of loose ends is not a strong point with Spies, which has heretofore made a virtue of ambiguousness, as the elderly narrator tries to discern what Stephen knew and when he knew it. But this is an accumulatively disturbing, knowingly crafted, against-all-odds witty novel, a literate pleasure not to be kept " privet. "
