Anna Aslanyan

Michael Frayn remembers old friends – and the spy who duped him

There are vignettes of many Cambridge contemporaries – including the mysterious John Sackur, the inspiration for the invisible man in Donkeys’ Years

Michael Frayn. [Getty Images] 
issue 08 April 2023

Tell me who you go with, and I’ll tell you who you are. Guided by this principle, Michael Frayn devotes his new memoir to his friends, embracing the chance to pay tribute to those who shaped him. The octogenarian warns in the foreword that his choice of protagonists is ‘pretty capricious’ – a comment on the arbitrary nature of both memory and creativity – and yet the way he treats them is anything but fickle. He remembers every one of them with fondness, never slipping into sentimentality or idealisation.

These sober recollections are interlaced with the irony familiar from Frayn’s novels, while his playwright’s genius occasionally flashes in such lines as ‘Two legs – a very reasonable number’. Every encounter is described in a self-effacing manner – ‘he mostly talking, me mostly listening’ being a common scenario. It’s only at the end that Frayn turns to his own persona, or rather his physical self.

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