BOOKS

Triumphant comedies of failure

Philip Hensher

Michael Frayn's Headlong didn't win the Booker prize this year, and no one can have been surprised, only rueful. The odds are heavily against any remotely comic novel, and it long ago turned into a prize for good behaviour by unexciting novelists. Anything further from a piece of good behaviour by an unexciting novelist than Headlong can hardly be imagined; it is a reckless, vulgar, ceaselessly entertaining romp. The ferocious comedy that results when avarice collides with the high-minded purity of the art world is sustained by a fierce intelligence, a mind which is at least as fascinated by abstract thought as by the motives of human beings. To be honest, I can't remember now what won the Booker this year, though I know I must have read it, whatever it was. What no one, surely, can have any doubt about is that the light- ness, swiftness and strength of Headlong, and of all Frayn's work will guarantee its permanent survival. It explores complex ideas of language and meaning through the unexpected means of the comic novel, and does so with a graceful confidence, the unmistakable mark of a surprising great- ness.

From the beginning of his splendid career, Frayn has been unusually taken by the implications of abstract ideas. Indeed, he wrote, in the 1970s, a philosophical work, Constructions. I've never seen a copy of it, but judging by the brilliant series of comic pieces he wrote for the Guardian and the Observer throughout the 1960s, it might be somewhat Wittgensteinian in tone. The best of the pieces are to do with the limits of communication. That sounds somewhat p0-faced, but the failure to understand what someone else is saying, or the attempt to state what cannot really be stated, is the source of some deathless low comedy. One of the funniest, from On the Outskirts, is about mishearing someone's name at a drinks party; it is, naturally, called 'I Said My Name Is Ozzy Manders, Dean of Kings'. Endless ingenious varia- tions are wrought on the same theme; meeting foreigners on holiday ('Oh, Un Peu, Vous Savez, Un Peu'), the inability of libel lawyers to see the point ('The link with Mr Bunnykin must be weakened by changing the sentence to "Later, a rabbit went to Farmer Barleycorn's lettuce patch, etc." '), or the bizarre and meaningless for- mulations of the television interview ('I Think I'm Right In Saying').

The acute awareness of meaningful and meaningless utterance produces a naturally gifted parodist. Where it tomes from is hinted at in the most brilliant of the columns, a parody of the later Wittgen- stein, 'Fog-Like Sensations'. In it, Wittgen- stein takes on the curious fact that the highway authorities find it necessary to erect signs saying 'Fog' to warn motorists that they are driving through fog. The par- ody is absolutely immaculate, and deeply loving of its victim.

Imagine that the motorist said: The trouble is, I can't see the fog for the fog. We might understand this as a request for practical information, and try to answer it by showing him the definition of fog in the dictionary. To this he might reply: I can't see 'fog' for the fog. We respond by putting the dictionary an inch in front of his eyes. Now he says: I can't see the fog for log'.

It is the continuing vivacity of the ideas which has preserved Frayn's comic pieces of 30 years ago. He began, like his beloved Chelchov, as a writer of comic sketches, and only slowly moved into longer fiction and drama; when he did so, it was clear that his one big idea, of the limits of language, had 'legs', as they say. More than that, it had backbone.

Frayn's first novels are incomparably brilliant variations on the single theme of mutual incomprehensibility, and the limits of language to say what we know we feel. That, in a sense, is where the novelist parts company with the philosopher. The philosopher knows that `woruber man nicht sprechen Icarus, clamber muss man schweigen.' The novelist, with his relaxed human sympathy, knows very well that even if we know that we don't know what we are trying to say; even if we know that we are not going to be understood by our inter- locutor, we still go on trying, with ruefully comic results.

Indeed, those who follow Wittgensteih's imprecation, and remain silent about what they cannot explain, come off no better. Chiddingfold, the director of the Computer Institute in The Tin Men, only speaks once in the course of the novel, and is a richly absurd figure. If a character does say what he means, he is not likely to be understood, as Sulpice in A Very Private Life tragically fails to understand.

What I'm working on at the moment is hyperequality. Not the same as superidentity, of course! In fact one might say the two terms arc starkly infraparallel!

But for the most part the comedy derives from people leaping to the wrong conclu- sion. The hero of Sweet Dreams failing to understand when he is talking to God is not unusual; in the Fraynian pantheon of misunderstanders, he is not even the most extreme. Nunn, the paranoid security man in The Tin Men, who begins by misunder- standing every action of his colleagues, pro- ceeding spectacularly to misread his own notes, is even more bizarre. There are occasional suggestions that we need this failure to communicate. Paul, in The Rus- sian Interpreter, finds his world falling apart when he mistakenly starts speaking in English instead of Russian, and his employ- er gets a glimpse of his highly approximate standards of translation.

'He's very pleased to be here,' he said uncer- tainly. At an occasion of this nature he recalls that he has many friends in learned institutions engaged on similar work in Britain.

We are protected, in a sense, because peo- ple do not understand exactly what we mean; Uncumber in A Very Private Life, who travels halfway across the world to meet a man with whom she shares no word of a language, would not be better off if she understood what he was telling her.

They are, essentially, that very English thing, comedies of failure. Towards the End of the Morning, which remains his funniest book, is the rueful accumulation of one sort of disaster after another. One charac- ter only is permitted to succeed, in strato- spheric fashion, as one of those 1960s television gurus, and he is by far the least likeable. For the rest of it, there is nothing but dim failure lying in wait for everyone. It is an unbelievably funny book, as the characters fail in the simplest tasks; they cannot take a flight, they cannot under- stand letters from each other, they cannot even manage to speak to their own daugh- ters on the telephone. In one virtuoso strand, the editor of the newspaper where the novel is set tries to sack the worst of his reporters, who simply refuses to believe that it can be anything but a wind-up:

'This crap's from you, is it?' said a cross voice. 'What?' Don't give me that crap. This load of crap's your idea of a joke, I take it?' 'Is that Reg Mounts?' Don't give me that crap."Reg, what are you talking about?' 'Bob, don't give me that crap.' I don't know what you're talking about, Reg.' Mounce hes-

itated. 'It was you who sent me this crap, wasn't it, Bob?' What crap, Reg?' You know what crap, Bob."Reg, I honestly don't know what on earth you're talking about.'

If you can't even succeed in being sacked, you might really come to believe that there is no hope for you.

Why a book so relentlessly about failure, like his much later screenplay Clockwise, should be so funny is an interesting point What sustains the early books is what was to turn him into the best playwright of his generation, an ability to inhabit, sometimes rather uncharitably, other people's voices. He was always a startlingly good parodist. Kingsley Amis and John Fowles get a really good duffing up in The Tin Men. The clichés of popular journalism have never been more ruthlessly filleted than in Towards the End of the Morning. 'Little did we realise when we blithely set sail from Petsamo in Lady Jane, our trusted convert- ed Carmarthen mussel boat ...' The analy- ses of computer-generated news stories in The Tin Men are still very much to the point, alas:

A rail crash was always entertaining, with or without children's toys still lying pathetically among the wreckage. Even a rail crash on the Continent made the grade provided there were at least five dead. If it was in the United States, the minimum number of dead rose to 20: in South America 100; in Africa 200; in China 500.

When Frayn returned to the novel after some years as a playwright, the comedy was slightly subdued, the element of parody less marked (although the titles of the imagi- nary novels in The Trick of It, his brilliant fable of creation and criticism, still retain the old sharpness). The melancholia which had always been implicit seemed, some- how, to be less easily contained; Headlong, like Towards the End of the Morning, is about failure, in relationships and in pro- fessional life, and also about a pathetically excessive ambition. But, though it is full of a beautifully judged sense of comedy, no one, I think, will set it down with the mem- ory of hilarity. It is more like a memento mori, and it ends, appropriately, with its protagonist awaiting a judgment the nature of which he cannot quite be sure about.

But what has been sustained with an incomparable, lightly worn intelligence is the life of ideas. In Frayn's earlier work, the hilarity is so overwhelming that one could be forgiven for not noticing how thoroughly the jokes are being orchestrated by a willing, sceptical disciple of Wittgen- stein. In the later work, the jokes are more delicate, the life of thought nearer the sur- face. But in Frayn's prose work, there has been a continuous thread, a consistent and consistently rewarding vision. On the sur- face, his work is, like Chelchov's, dazzlingly varied, matchlessly resourceful. What the reader will quickly come to discover is how rewardingly unified it all really is, how strongly it reflects the preoccupations of a remarkable, sympathetic mind.