"Skios" by MIchael Frayn

Longlisted for the 2012 Booker Prize.

This is a classic farce. Oliver Fox, floppy haired charmer, pretends for a moment to be Dr Norman Wilfred. He is whisked off to a Foundation for Civilisation with twenty four hours to go before he gives the keynote lecture on Scientometrics. Meanwhile the real Dr Wilfred is taken to a remote villa where he finds Oliver's girlfriend.

And it progresses. Bedrooms are hopped. Identities are confused. More girlfriends and boyfriends arrive. Sinister Russian oligarchs are building mysterious swimming pools. Spiros and Stavros are interchangeable Greek taxi drivers.

It should be a play. There are only three scenes: the airport at the start and then the Foundation and the Villa interchangeably.

It is all a little predictable. There are the usual jokes at the expense of academics and anyone rich who spends time at Foundations and Conferences. There is humour mined from the confusion between Greek and English. All the characters are stereotypes: the chef, the American lady who used to be a dancer and married the rich man who bequeathed the money to the foundation, the slightly sad professor, the good time girl, the crisp, cool PA etc.

It becomes interesting for a moment at the start of chapter 48 when the author discusses how the storylines are about to come together in a great denouement and suggests alternative endings. This suggests that Netownian determinism is impossible because of the inherent impossibilities of understanding any single initial state, a theme Frayn also touched upon in his philosophical work 'The Human Touch' (which I disliked). He suggests that only probabilities exist and then casts doubt even on this. This theme of the book has been manifest throughout: Oliver's penchant for pretending to be someone he is not and thereby throwing spanners into all sorts of works and Dr Wilfred's essential belief in predestination.

Skios is quite fun. It is easy to read and lightly humorous. But it is a farce of the old school.

I've also seen Frayn's theatrical farce, Noises Off. 

April 2013; 277 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Human Touch" by Michael Frayn

I hate this book. I wanted to throw it across the room.

Novelist and playwright Michael Frayn exposes the inadequacies in Science, Maths, Logic, Linguistics, Philosophy and Psychology through the power of his introspection and rhetoric.

I don't think so.

Sorry, Michael, but most of what you have to say has been said before. Your primary thesis seems to be Man is the measure of things which was around before Socrates. Your tool for demolishing Physics seems to be Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle although I think you have confused it with Chaos Theory. Maths has long understood and accepted Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Logic knows the limitations of the syllogism. The people who work in these fields are well aware of the philosophical paradoxes that lie at the heart of their endeavours. These do not mean that all of Science, Maths etc are wrong. It means they aren't perfect. What is?

I object to your apparent belief that you can, just using introspection, revolutionise ideas have been developed through hard work by intelligent people over hundreds of years. Having admitted "The only way I can begin  to approach it [science] is through the supposedly 'accessible' books that some scientists write for laymen, and I can't honestly claim to understand more than a fraction even of these" you go on to ridicule the attempts of scientists to explain their theories. You sneer that these scientific laws are nothing more than explanations. And? Your point is?

I could go on and on. You certainly do. One of the flaws of this book is the endless repetition which your rhetoric demands.

Just one other moan. You claim that it is impossible, by introspection, to decide how or when decision are made. But psychologists using cleverly designed experiments can throw light on how humans think. But you ignore the hard work of so many because you are carried away with your own arguments.

I hated this book. It is endorsed by A.C. Grayling. This makes me not want to read anything ACG has written.