Word: frayne
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...VERY PRIVATE LIFE by Michael Frayn. 132 pages. Viking...
Britain's Michael Frayn has switched in the past few years from professional satirist-funny once a week in the London Observer-to novelist. Few writers have managed that transition successfully, and even fewer with Frayn's apparently effortless assurance. His first three novels (The Tin Men, The Russian Interpreter and Against Entropy) dealt humorously enough with contemporary life. His fourth is bolder and by no means funny...
AGAINST ENTROPY by Michael Frayn. 248 pages. Viking...
After spending seven years working for British newspapers, Pundit Michael Frayn is convinced that they are all suffering from a disease called entropy-the process by which things fall apart. Which is just what they do in this engaging novel set in the offices of a large London daily. No one on the staff has more than a passing concern for the interests of the paper. One staffer spends the day turning out scripts for the BBC; another writes syllabuses for grammar school courses; John Dyson, a department head, yearns to establish himself as a television panelist. Frayn...
...apartment, after which, naturally, P-G and Manning are kidnaped by the secret police and flung into jail. The book winds up with the two freed from prison and jetting home to London. The implication is that Proctor-Gould is now spying for the Russians. But is he really? Frayn doesn't say. The effect is illogical but somehow appropriate, as it is, perhaps, in real-life espionage...