I love Michael Frayn – and this is one of his early works and has quite a different style to the famous books like Headlong, or Spies. It’s humourous for a start, in an overt but also somewhat try-hard way. It’s not as tight as his other books, and feels like a play that got diverted to a book. I think it is a book because it has too many characters to be a play, and it feels unwieldy and loose, but not even this faint criticism diminishes the particular quality all his books have. The man can write, damnit!