![]() The night started with a presentation by Jackie Mansourian from PEN Melbourne who spoke about the Armenian Genocide- that other centenary that marks the arrest of 250 Armenian intellectuals on 24 April- and the resistance of the Turkish government to have it acknowledged as the century’s first genocide. This Anzac-eve function was organized at the Deakin Edge theatre at Fed Square by the Medical Association for the Prevention of War, with support from the ANZAC Centenary Peace Coalition and funding from the Dept of Veteran Affairs ANZAC Centenary Local Grants Program. You’re in the hands of a master writer, and you know it. I really liked this book, just as much on the second reading as on the first. Little details fit together so cleverly- the play on ‘privet’ for example- and the last chapter colours in much of what had only been sketchy or incomplete previously. The story is told with humour and humility, and the adult Stephen is affectionately kind to his younger self and withholds judgment from him. This was the second time that I had read the book, but I think even the first time I quickly cottoned on to Stephen’s misconstructions – just as Frayn, I think, intended his readers to do. Hartley’s The Go-Between or Ian McEwan’s Atonement, and as in those books, the narrator in Spies also sees too much and yet doesn’t know what s/he is looking at.įrayn’s control of the story is masterful, especially in the switch between present tense and reminiscence, which can be clunky in less sure hands. So the boys snooped in her writing desk and followed her, and found more than they had bargained for. After all, there was her diary with the odd crosses once a month in keeping with the phases of the moon (for night-time spying duties, of course), and she seemed to spend a lot of time going into the village posting letters (to the German authorities, of course) or pretending to shop for her sister who lived down the street. Stephen was drawn along in Keith’s wake and when Keith announced that his mother was a German spy, well, then- yes, perhaps she was. His friend Keith was unpopular too, but he lived in a big house, his toys were kept in pristine condition in their boxes, and the afternoon teas dispensed by Keith’s mother were Blytonesque, even if she did so without ever quite acknowledging Stephen’s presence. Stephen Wheatley was small and unpopular, with ears that stuck out. For the narrator of Spies it was the cloying, heady smell of a flower in a suburban garden, and it took him back to a wartime summer, a hideout in the garden hedge, secrets, fantasies and ambivalent shame.
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