Hard on the heels of the ecstatically received London revival of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (currently playing at the Novello Theatre) comes this hilarious novel. It’s not easy to pull off farce on the printed page when so many of the laughs of the genre generally depend upon physical comedy. In Noises Off, for example, one character hops about the stage like a demented kangaroo, his shoelaces tied together. But just as a filthy joke is made funnier when told by an apparently po-faced academic, so a really silly plot is enlivened when composed by a highly clever author.
Frayn is that man. In the hands of someone less accomplished, the events in Skios would be too improbable, its characterisation too thin, its reliance on that old trope, mistaken identity, just too plain daft. As it is, you can sit back and let the book lap over you like the warm waters surrounding the imaginary Greek isle of the title.
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