Amusement and bemusement are the twin engines of Michael Frayn's writing. The former is fuelled by an unusually sharp sense of audience, and the wish to entertain with knowledge, narrative, witty structures and wit itself; the latter depends on a residual sense of self-doubt, distraction, wonder and confusion in the face of experience. It means, among other things, that no matter how clever his books and plays might be, they readily admit the impossibility of knowing everything, and however ambitious they might seem, they have an accompanying air of modesty. This is a crucial part of their charm, and of their originality.
It is also why Frayn can seem elusive within his own writing: his desire to amuse is a sociable instinct, his bemusement is more solitary. Tension between the two is immediately evident in the title of his autobiography, My Father's Fortune: A Life, in which it's not immediately apparent whose life it is anyway his own or his father's. In the event, the story belongs to both of them, which licenses a good many revelations of a personal kind, and also guarantees a certain amount of concealment. The result is a book that feels at once genuinely delving, yet decently guarded.
It's often very funny, always very interesting, and soaked in a wistful sort of melancholy that sometimes deepens into a compelling sadness. It's also a book that has as much to say about a particular slice of English life, at a particular time, as it does about individual characters. Characterising his upbringing as "lower middle class", Frayn begins by telling us about his parents' childhoods and courtship. They met in Holloway, north London, when his father-to-be Tommy was 18 and Vi 14. He had left school four years previously and was working as a wages clerk while sharing a crowded house with his family; she was a schoolgirl from a (slightly) better side of the tracks, with an ambition to study violin at the Royal Academy.
It was love at first sight, but 11 years before they could afford to marry and move into a flat in Mill Hill, with Vi's mother. Frayn's deft account of this prewar time, which mingles memories of hard graft, with (on Tommy's part, at least) cocky optimism, is a fascinating counterpart to the more pretentious Pooterism of a while before, and the almost-contemporary Metroland. It is a part of the book that begins by feeling like background, but very quickly establishes itself as foreground in the sense that it creates the "fair seedtime" for Frayn's personality and the imagination it feeds.
More precise parallels between the parents' characters and their son's eventual profession are hard to find though Frayn himself is understandably keen to hunt them down. He speaks for instance of his father's "favourite words" (and especially of one that he imagines "began life as a conjuror's invocation: hotchamachacha"), and also of a tendency to "improve" stories by exaggerating then relates them to his own habits as a writer, calling them an aspect of genetic programming.
Who knows? More certainly, if only because more pervasively, the habits of the family (which soon included a sister, Jill) seem to have bred in Frayn an unusually good eye for the way spaces influence behaviour. When they move on from Mill Hill to East Ewell, the extra space in the new house means extra status, but also the kind of social bafflement that later appears in his plays and novels. One passage, in particular, even sounds like the description of a stage-set:
"We never do anything in the lounge. The front door and the staircase open directly into it, which makes it cold and draughty. The lounge is the main highway to the front door and the stairs to the rest of the house, and there are always people going back and forth through it.
"Even going back and forth through it is difficult, though, because the great bulk of the unused settee and the two unemployed armchairs take up most of the space, and if you sat in them you'd have people squeezing past you and falling over their feet all the time."
When Tommy Frayn tried to influence his son more directly, the result was usually much less successful. Young Michael was hopeless at cricket; he was "a mother's boy"; he even seemed to spurn (or be incapable of adopting) his father's wiliness and instead always seemed to have his head in the clouds, contemplating . . . well, nothing much. The history of this mismatching is gently done, but nevertheless has real pathos and its mixture of comedy and sadness soon rises to a higher pitch, when war breaks out. Farcical scenes involving ducks and bomb shelters alternate with others that feature V2s and smashed ceilings; in every case they're filtered through the understanding of a 10-year-old who cannot be confident that what he feels is genuine, and what he sees is comprehensible.
Then an unmistakable tragedy strikes. His mother dies. Frayn writes about this with very moving simplicity, expressing feelings that often seem all the more painful for having been buried, or at least left unspoken, for a long time. In this respect, he turns out once again to be his father's son, since Tommy's reaction to widowhood was barely to mention his wife again.
The scenes surrounding this death, which come at the centre of the book, undoubtedly form its climax, and in certain respects its raison d'être. This is not to say that what follows feels like a letdown, rather that it maps a consciousness which is less mysterious because it is older, a little tougher, and certainly more knowing. For this reason, the second half of the book seems more familiar while being no less well-managed. We watch Frayn begin to discover his wit and wits at Kingston Grammar School. We understand that accusations he levels against his teenage self (of being a prig and a know-all) are probably justified. We glance ahead to his academic success, his early career as a reporter, and his first marriage.
And Tommy? The story of his later life was decidedly mixed with an eventually failing second marriage to "a tiny bouncing bee of a woman", a career selling asbestos, coping with deafness and eventually cancer. Frayn recalls these things with a tenderness that is never mawkish, and is careful to set them beside happier memories in particular a late romance. In this way, he re-presents his book's original balance, and gives a final estimate of his father's fortune: "An intangible and unrecorded legacy more precious than money or anything he might ever have written down. The humour he used to deal with his customers and circumvent his deafness; his indifference to all systems of belief; the smile on his face that I sometimes find so disconcertingly on mine." Frayn has written books that make a bigger bang than this, but none that is so touching.
Andrew Motion's The Cinder Path is published by Faber.
