Skios: A Novel by Michael Frayn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Here’s a fun, fast farce for you to read on a plane or a boat or a train, in a deck chair, or sprawled on your couch while the last of the summer breezes plays with your living room curtains. But maybe not curled up in your sweater and socks by a fire, cup of hot tea or cocoa nearby. Skios is more of a mai-tai or rum tiki kind of novel. It’s set on a fictional Greek island, you see, complete with accented natives, bubble-headed white people, a good looking ne’erdowell and a chubby, gruff old lecturer.
In other words, not a book for plumbing the depths of character development, or to peek a pique at the human condition. It was only after I read it that I discovered author Michael Frayn is a playwright, and a writer of farces, and this novel falls right into that niche as neatly as its characters fall into the absurdity of their assumptions.
Skios is a sort of a Comedy of Errors, but only sort of, as the situation is perpetuated not my mistaken identity and confusion so much as willful misrepresentation and ill-placed certainty. Coincidences stack on top of coincidences, near-misses abound, all of it heading towards an inevitable conclusion that, in the end, we’re saved from by some rather convenient deus ex machina.
But I guess that sort of thing is allowed in a farce. I guess if one’s going to take up the debris left behind by Comedy of Errors or even The Importance of Being Earnest, one’s allowed to make it all silly, then violently sweep away the anticipated conclusion. And I do mean violently.
Look for the movie based on this book at some point, starring whatever post-SNL (or the British equivalent) actor looking to bridge from comedy to something taken slightly more seriously. Look for Tom Stoppard to come in and do an emergency re-write, “saving” the story by actually giving it an ending. Look for the bartender when you’re half-way through the book, because even though it’s silly, you won’t want to put it down, but you will want another mai-tai.