Word: sun
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Landing on the Sun, Michael Frayn's new novel, starts and ends with a pair of hands. Brian Jessel, the narrator, describes the actions and qualities of the hands, and his description is impersonal and efficient. We learn subsequently that the hands belong to Jessel, but it seems that he never understands this fact, nor its reflection on himself: the banality of his life is so great that he doesn't seem to notice that he is alive...
Jassel's predicament makes A Landing on the Sun both humorous and sad, and thus the novel will neither surprise nor disappoint readers familiar with Frayn's most recent work, The Trick of It. Like most of his plays, novels, and screenplays, A Lnading on the Sun is a comic work of light, unassuming wit, tempered with the author's usual quiet sense of the prosaic tragedy of life. Frayn's greatest strength rests in his talent at reconciling humor and sadness, and he achieves this rapprochement in the book with gentle facility...
...Landing on the Sun...
...reader finishes A Landing on the Sun feeling almost sucker-punched, albeit gently. The story allows Jessel to see their achievement of happiness, but the reader ultimately realizes the impossibility of happiness in Jessel's own life. The light touch of Frayn's clever humor makes Jessel's tragedy more poignant...
Frayn gives a whimsical edge to Jessel's serious outlook--and succeeds winningly at a type of comedy that seems particular to the British. But what is important and moving in A Landing on the Sun, and what most likely won it Britain's most valuable fiction prize, the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, is its profound sense of prosaic tragedy. The laughing stops abruptly at the end of A Landing on the Sun, and in this breathless transition Michael Frayn succeeds magnificently...