The key to the book's success is Frayn's decision to respect young Stephen's point of view without staking everything on recreating it. Stephen's older self frets over the past which is the boy's present, without claiming authority over it. The sheer foreignness of childhood requires that he use the third person as often as the first ('I watch him emerge from the warped front door, still cramming food into his mouth from tea'). Physical sensations - the feel of a tumbler of lemon barley, the taste of chocolate spread - survive better in memory than past states of mind. This can seem a rather perverse piece of construction, setting up a double perspective and then muffling it, but its great virtue is that it shuts out whimsy. Aside from the understated tact and ingenuity of its mystery plot, Frayn's novel excels in its rendering of the power of early impressions" - John Updike, The New Yorker There was much discussion of the novel's form and characterisation. One reader wondered how much Frayn might have learned from his work for the stage. The author spoke of the sharp differences between the two forms, and the wholly different ways in which we come to know the thoughts of characters in plays and in novels. The essence of Spies, he thought, was undramatic: getting to know what Stephen thinks he is seeing, and knowing as readers that reality must be something different.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a more suspenseful novel than The Spies. Michael Frayn has crafted a remarkable story of WWII intrigue told through the eyes of a young boy living in a tight family neighborhood in London. In the 1940s, some boys played Cops & Robbers, some played Cowboys & Indians. But Stephen and Keith, English boys and neighbours during WWII, played Spies. Sure, it's a less well known game, but it is just as engrossing, and involves a hideout and a logbook, lots of sneaking around, and monitoring the movements and whereabouts of... Keith's mother, who the boys are certain is a German spy. One day, while Stephen is in the lookout, Keith's mother attempts to approach him, possibly to request his assistance in delivering a letter. However, she stops when she notices Stephen with Barbara.

Stephen is a follower, not a leader, a second child prey to bullies at school, who is befriended by Keith, a lonely child from a better school. Keith develops a fantasy that his mother is a German spy, and co-opts Stephen into a scheme to spy on her. The game becomes more serious because she does indeed have secrets, and the nature of these secrets and their gradual revelation form the core of the book, along with what Stephen learns about his own family.

What is a plot? For the reader, it is the discovery of concealed connections between events in a narrative. Michael Frayn's Spies is a novel with a carefully engineered plot, and a story whose two main characters are determined to uncover the sinister logic of apparently ordinary events. They are themselves looking for a plot. Spies was well-received by the literary community, with many critics praising Frayn for his creative and original approach. [2] Once published, Spies went on to win the 2002 Whitbread Novel of the year for achievement in literary excellence, and the 2002 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature. Stephen Wheatley – A shy boy who finds himself drawn into Keith's games and is a frequent target of school bullies. The book hints at that Stephen suffers from OCD, and seems to be sexually attracted to Barbara. Für deutsche Leser hält dieser bewundernswerte Roman eine unangenehme Pointe bereit. Sie hat zu tun mit Hitlers Krieg gegen England und mit der Verfolgung der Juden. (...) Man wird wider Willen der Tatsache gewahr, dass selbst in diesem englischen Kammerspiel über Unordnung und frühes Leid die deutsche Vergangenheit nicht vergeht." - Ulrich Greiner, Die Zeit Stephen Wheatley is a dreamy, dopey lad in one of the newly created outer suburbs of wartime London, sloping about the place like an unmade bed. He forges an unlikely friendship with Keith Hayward, a fiercely disciplined, faintly sinister boy with a fiercely disciplined, more than faintly sinister father and a deliciously urbane, charming mother, who in the film version would probably be played by Kristin Scott Thomas.Frayn had told us at the beginning of the evening that he had given the book to the childhood friend who was the original of Keith, and that this friend had recognised himself and the depiction of his softly threatening father. At the end of the evening, a reader made an eloquent plea for sympathy for this character. Did the novel not suggest that he might have suffered in the first world war? (He is an older father, too old to do military service in the second world war.) Indeed, was he not the potential twin of Peter, the terrified "hero" who has suffered such trauma as a bomber pilot? The character is "an awful man, obviously" – but for a reason. Frayn thought this was indeed a clever reading, of which he had not been conscious. The man on whom he was based had been horrible; the fictional character had slipped away from his original and become somebody altogether more complicated. Frayn withholds information presumably to allow Stephen to relive the whole process of obtaining (guilty) knowledge, of losing innocence; unfortunately he goes about it in a far too heavy-handed way. Barbara joins Stephen in the hideout, and they are discovered by Stephen's father, who instructs Stephen to take the basket with him. Stephen's parents take the basket, leaving Stephen feeling guilty, worried that the man will go hungry.

I thought it very obvious, very early who was being helped on the other side of the tunnel, though there might have been some slight suspense about why it was Keith's mother (were we told her name? I don't remember) doing the helping, though I suspect that was obvious too. But it didn't really matter. The strength of the book was in all the undertones and little details – what really went on behind the privet. Keith's father, for example, was a chilling character that I disliked intensely from his first appearance and although I suppose he was a tragic character of sorts, I didn't have an ounce of sympathy for him. Not so, Keith. Keith had all the signs of turning out a bully just like his father, but I did have some sympathy for him, though I didn't think Frayn showed him much. The first chapter introduces Stephen, the main character and narrator, an elderly man who recalls his past triggered by a familiar smell. While walking with his daughter and granddaughter, he encounters the same scent again. They identify it as coming from a common German bush called "linguster." Motivated by these memories, Stephen decides to revisit his childhood home in London. Events in the Close don't bear close examination, even if the secrets the boys uncover, without quite understanding them, are relatively mundane. No less painful for that. Spies is divided into 11 numbered sections and the first and last of these are like a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue has many of the clues as to the meaning of the memories that follow. The point of these is that they have to be noticed as clues. The narrator's vivid "glimpses" of the past may come "in random sequence", but we must guess that they are not random in the least. "A shower of sparks ... A feeling of shame ... Someone unseen coughing, trying not to be heard ... A jug covered by a lace weighted with four blue beads ..." If we remember this passage as we read, our attention will snag on these elements as we encounter them again and we will reach for the hidden connections between them.Older Stephen's declining memory results in his search for clarification and closure, as Frayn uses a blend of different narrative viewpoints to distinguish what young Stephen thought was accurate at the time and reality. Update this section!

A subplot is also included in the novel, where Stephen finds comfort in Barbara Berrill– a girl Stephen's age living in his neighbourhood– who is used as a plot device for revealing very important information that helps Stephen understand the mysteries he is uncovering. Barbara is also an important part of Stephen's transition from the childish world that he shared with Keith to the adult world, filled with complications but also understanding. An interesting point of the novel was the presentation of the characters and then how Stephen perceived them after the reader had already come to their own conclusions. For instance, the reader develops a distinct dislike for the men of the Hayward men right from the start, but it takes Stephen really up until the bayonet incident to truly recognise how better off he is without having them as a blood relation. Stephen fast-forwards the narrative to when he and Keith create an official hiding spot where they can spy on Keith’s mother in the privet hedges that adorn the front of Miss Durrant’s bombed house. They swear to never tell anyone about their secret mission, and Keith erects a sign labelled “Privet” (“private” misspelled) at the entrance of their concealed hangout. Keith and Stephen grow up in Britain during WW II. When the two kids play a game of imagination that works on the premise that Keith’s mother is a German spy, the boys start following her around, but what they find out is certainly not what they expected and the consequences of their game get out of control.From that moment onward, Stephen does not question Keith’s claim, and the two begin devising an undercover mission to spy on Keith’s mother. They convert a used notebook into a logbook and carry out their first investigation in Keith’s mother’s sitting room. Stephen and Keith find her diary and make note of little “ x” marks in her calendar that occur once a month. They attribute it to a notation for secret meetings, but it is more likely that the x’s simply mark her menstrual cycles. Stephen, from the present, notes that this is another turning point in the story.