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Read The Opening Paragraph.: Spies by Michael Frayn
Read The Opening Paragraph.: Spies by Michael Frayn
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?