A few days ago I finished reading Skios by Michael Frayn. A
few thoughts.
Skios is an experiment to write a farce in the form of a
novel. I didn’t know this when I bought the book, as the words Michael and
Frayn in conjunction above the title were enough. But clearly the
thought of another Michael Frayn farce is a thrilling prospect; this is, after
all, the fellow who wrote Noises Off and Clockwise.
But as an experiment it doesn’t quite work, because the
farce doesn’t quite work. I hate to bang on about rules because rules are there to be
broken, but in this instance, the problems of the book are all because it doesn’t
follow the rules of farce.
Firstly, the inciting incident, the pebble that precipitates
the avalanche, is that in an airport arrivals lounge a character called Oliver
Fox sees the name ‘Dr Norman Wilfred’ being held up on a card by an attractive
woman and decides to ‘become’ Dr Norman Wilfred, just to see what happens. This
is the keystone of the whole novel, and it doesn’t really work, because Oliver
doesn’t have a very good reason to do this – and in farce, everything has to happen
for a simple, logical reason – and because through the course of the novel he
can decide to stop pretending to be Dr Norman Wilfred any time he wants without
incurring any negative consequences. So throughout the story, this character
acts as a wobbly wheel. There should have been a good reason why he had to
pretend to be someone else, and why he can’t stop the pretence. If it was an
Ealing comedy, it would be because he was on the run from the law. That would
do it.
Secondly, there’s the problem of pace. On film, or in a
play, the audience will excuse characters making mistakes based on partial
information or talking at cross purposes if there is a limited amount of time
available, with no time for them to explain away the various misunderstandings.
But in Skios, there isn’t that sense of pace; the events unfold over the course
of several days and for large parts of the story there is such a lack of
urgency that characters start sunbathing. There’s also the problem that the
story unfolds at two different ends of an island, so there’s all the time taken
getting from one end to the other to be accounted for; normally farces take
place within one building, or one street, specifically to avoid the problem of
time being wasted getting from a to b. And also because, if the action unfolds
in a limited space, it’s more plausible for characters to bump into each other;
without that confinement, a lot of plausibility is lost.
Thirdly, Frayn makes the odd choice of telling the story
mostly through internal monologues (when he isn’t killing the pace by spending
half a page by describing the sun, moon, the sea and the flowers) which means a lot of the potential for comedy is lost. Because in a novel,
words speak louder than actions. Dialogue is also fast to read, whereas
description is slow. When there are comic exchanges the book does come alive
albeit briefly. It's why the BBC radio adaptation is markedly funnier than the novel, as the adaptor has been forced to re-write scenes to take place in terms of dialogue.
And fourthly, most disappointingly of all, there’s the
ending. With a farce, the whole point is the backward-engineering from a satisfying
conclusion where all the plot threads coincide and every developing problem
is resolved (or at least exposed). In Skios, Frayn perversely decides not
to do this. He does spend a couple of pages on a ‘what if’ scenario, where he
asks ‘what if these were characters in a book’ and gives a synopsis on how the
story could end neatly and comically. Having done that, he instead ends the
book in a way which comes across as an authorial shrug of resignation, as if he
couldn’t be bothered to finish the story at all. The end result is that plot
threads are left hanging, various characters have been introduced to play no
part in the proceedings, and basically you’re left wondering if the whole exercise has been a waste of time.
Imagine if a plane had crashed onto Fawlty Towers 25 minutes into an episode,
wiping out all the occupants in a huge fireball. That’s the literary effect
that Frayn achieves.
So, coming from the guy who wrote Noises Off and Clockwise,
as well as the fabulous Headlong and the gorgeous Spies and Copenhagen and so
on and so on, this is a weird mis-step. It’ also odd that he should think
writing farce as a novel was an experiment, when PG Wodehouse and Tom Sharpe
have pretty much proved that it can be done (and how it should be done). So if
you want to read a great farce, I’d recommend their works, or any of Joe Keenan’s
awe-inspiring novels.
