The good year, shortly before the end of his life, the year's reprieve between his first cancer and the second. My exasperation evaporates in the warmth of it.ġ969, yes, when I was writing my first play. And my father's familiar smile, like the sun coming up. The hat is followed by a pair of spectacles-a hearing aid-a trim gray moustache. Of course! Naturally! The black homburg! Just when I've got a chance to work undistracted! Why hadn't he phoned, like anyone else? Why hadn't he rung the bell or shouted "Anyone at home?" Why hadn't he at least taken his hat off? I'm looking at the last homburg in southeast London, perhaps in Western Europe. But then no one still wears homburg hats. No one round our way locks their front doors in 1969. The year must be 1969, I realize from the internal evidence when I reconstruct the scene in my memory. Around the edge of it, with a certain deferential caution, comes a hat. The two older children are at school, my wife's out with the baby, the house is empty. The handle of my study door softly turns. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. Father and son were in some odd ways ridiculously alike, in others ridiculously different and the journey back down the corridors of time is sometimes comic, sometimes painful, as Michael Frayn comes to see how much he has inherited from his father - and makes one or two surprising discoveries about both of them along the way.
This is above all the story of his father, the quick-witted boy from a poor and struggling family, who overcame so many disadvantages and shouldered so many burdens to make a go of his life who found happiness, had it snatched away from him in a single instant, and in the end, after many difficulties, perhaps found it again.
As he tries to see it through the eyes his parents and the others who shaped his life, he comes to realise how little he ever knew or understood about them. In this book he sets out to rediscover that lost land before all trace of it finally disappears beyond recall. 'An unknown place.' This was what Michael Frayn's children called the shadowy landscape of the past from which their family had emerged.
0 kommentar(er)
