A Landing on the Sun - Hardcover

Frayn, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670839329 ISBN 13: 9780670839322

Publisher: Viking Press, 1992

Synopsis

The author of The Trick of It uses his satiric wit in a comedy featuring two unlikely lovers who have wreaked chaos in the halls of the English congress. 10,000 first printing. National ad/promo.

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Reviews

Frayn, a hit British dramatist ( Noises Off ) and comic novelist ( The Trick of It ) has created a tender civil service comedy of the kind that only an Englishman could bring off. The almost anonymous narrator, a basically dry-as- dust denizen of Whitehall, is charged with investigating the mysterious demise of a colleague, Stephen Summerchild, who had fallen to his death from high in the Admiralty offices years before. Bit by bit, through old files, photographs and a cache of uproarious tapes, he pieces together the strangest romance: that of Summerchild and a Russian-born Oxford philosophy don who had been summoned, in a moment of government madness, to investigate the nature of happiness. Amid much beautifully spoofed academic chatter, the two find a profound attraction and create a literal love nest in a tiny room high under the government eaves. Meanwhile the narrator so enters into their ridiculous but poignant relationship that he almost, but not quite, breaks loose of his own fusty ways; and he does learn why Summerchild fell. Frayn writes with great wit, a haunting sense of the atmosphere and texture of quiet London lives and places, and a profound knowledge of the official heart. This is a masterly comic performance with a hint of rue.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Frayn, noted for his waggish plays (Noises Off, Benefactors) as well as his novel, The Trick of It (1990), turns a British civil servant's investigation into an unexplained 15-year-old death into a winsome, whimsical comedy. Middle-aged nonentity Brian Jessel is assigned to look discreetly--and forestall the tabloid journalists' recurring interest- -into the 1974 death of equally minor government minion Stephen Summerchild, who evidently fell from an Admiralty window onto M06D property, becoming an everlasting mystery. Did Summerchild fall accidentally, jump, or get pushed? And why should his blameless life have ended so irregularly--contact, perhaps, with foreign powers? Tracking down and sifting through the reports Summerchild dutifully filed during the last months of his life, Jessel follows his footsteps as his assignment--a study of contemporary ``quality of life''--takes him to Elizabeth Serafin (an austere Oxford philosophy don who demonstrates to him Socratically that happiness is necessarily a subjective concept) and through the belly of dialectic to an unlikely and desperate love affair with Dr. Serafin, documented with amusing and maddening ellipses on a series of typed transcripts and audiotapes. All the while, Jessel, whose small son barely moors him in his present life, finds himself dissolving into Summerchild, wondering why Millie Summerchild, whom Jessel had known for years from an amateur orchestra, had dropped out of sight a week before her father's death, and what Dr. Serafin's three sons are up to that's driven their mother to such grief. Whimsically charming to the end, but grave and sweetly sad as well--altogether a very British affair. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

After a slow start, Frayn's story-within-a-story technique finally takes off. As the novel opens, British Civil Servant Brian Jessel is asked to investigate the mysterious death of former employee Summerchild. Although 15 years in the past, this death appears to be an embarrassment within the Whitehall establishment. But no one knows why. What had Summerchild been working on and with whom was he working? Jessel immerses himself completely in the project. The ludicrous nature of Summerchild's situation is best summed up by the narrator: "Yes, better they our enemies should see the plans for a nuclear submarine than this!" Frayn's poke at the foibles of bureaucracy will appeal to devotees of satirical fiction. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/91.
- Patricia C. Heaney, Nassau Community Coll. Lib., Garden City, N.Y.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Viking Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670839329
• ISBN 13: 9780670839322
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 249