Spotlight on Chapter 1

Spies by Michael Frayn

NB Page references relate to the Faber and Faber 2002 edition.

Read the opening paragraph.

Annotate it, using these bullet points to help you:

 What has Frayn revealed about the narrator?

 What is the effect of the use of the present
simple tense?
 How has the scene been set in terms of time
and place?
 In what way is the opening sensory?
 What themes are already emerging?

Pp.3 - 4
 The first-person narrator describes a particular smell.
Underline/highlight the words and phrases used to
describe the odour.
 Frayn has used synaesthesia – when something
associated with one of the five senses is applied to a
different sense. See what examples of this you can find.
 What can you say about the sentence length?
 What else have we learned about the narrator and his situation?
 Although we do not yet know what the smell signifies to the narrator, how does
Frayn imply that it is reminding him of a particular point of his childhood?
 At this stage, Frayn chooses not to reveal the English name of the shrub.
However, it is privet – a shrub very often used for garden hedges. What language
do you think ‘Liguster’ might be in?

Pp.5-6
 In what ways is the language at this point in the chapter highly fragmentary?
 Which main characters have been introduced? Even at this very early stage, what
is our impression of them?
 In what way is information hinted at and withheld in Chapter 1?

Answer the following question:

How does Michael Frayn make the opening to Spies so intriguing?

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