{"id":264,"date":"2003-04-15T14:52:28","date_gmt":"2003-04-15T14:52:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/2003\/04\/spies\/"},"modified":"2003-04-15T14:52:28","modified_gmt":"2003-04-15T14:52:28","slug":"spies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/2003\/04\/spies\/","title":{"rendered":"Spies"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t think that before reading Michael Frayn’s previous novel, Headlong<\/a>, I’d read any of his work.
\nI’ve certainly seen some of his plays – most notably Copenhagen about the meeting of Bohr and Heisenberg in Copenhagen during the Second World War. I taped it not too long ago, when it was shown on BBC4.
\nI’ve also seen a production of Uncle Vanya which he’s translated.
\nSo it didn’t take too big a decision, to pick up his latest Whitbread Award winning latest<\/a>.
\nI try never to read too much about what a book is going to be about before I start, and I only really knew that this took place amongst children in wartime Britain. Well I suppose that’s all you need to know.
\nTo begin with, I thought that it was going to recover the ground covered by Atonement, where a child’s lie has massive repercussions. But this isn’t a story on the scale of that, even though it revolves around a similar incident.
\nI raced through this and am looking forward to trying some Frayn’s reissued older work. In particular, Towards the End of the Morning<\/a> which is supposed to be a Fleet Street classic (can get it in a 2 for \ufffd10 offer at Blackstones, maybe with Lucky Jim<\/a>).
\nIn the meantime, I’m torn over my next book. The Dark Lady of DNA<\/a> has just been published (and I got it yesterday lunchtime in another 2 for \ufffd10 offer – this time at Waterstones, with The Secret State<\/a> itself an interesting read). And when I got home, I found that my trade paperback copy of The White Lioness<\/a> by Henning Mankell had arrived.
\nAll in all I have a lot of reading to do!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t think that before reading Michael Frayn’s previous novel, Headlong, I’d read any of his work. I’ve certainly seen some of his plays – most notably Copenhagen about the meeting of Bohr and Heisenberg in Copenhagen during the Second World War. I taped it not too long ago, when it was shown on BBC4. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.adambowie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}