Michael Frayn, A Landing on the Sun (1992).
Good Reads meta-data is 242 pages rated 3.65 by 426 litizens.
Genre: Novel.
DNA: Brit
Verdict: Who cares.
Tagline: Who dunnit?
A story within a story, as Hamlet has a play within a play. It is 1990 and a middling middle aged civil servant is directed to look into the accidental death of a middling middle aged civil servant in 1974 who had fallen to his death on a Sunday from an upper level of Admiralty House.
Since Victim had no business being in Admiralty House at any time, let alone Sunday, the coroner’s court had recorded an open verdict. Accordingly, an air of mystery surrounded this death, and periodically a lazy journalist in search of a scandal rakes it up. To anticipate the next iteration of that chestnut, Middling is to prepare a briefing. In the best fictional detective tradition he tries to retrace Victim’s steps in his last months when he was seconded to a new unit, established by an incoming government, on the ‘quality of life’ when that phrase was ubiquitous, meaning everything and nothing to any and everyone.
A philosopher was appointed chair the Quality of Life Committee and she and Victim start to prepare the terms of reference…, and never get beyond that. She turns the occasion into a tutorial in which she quizzes Victim on the quality of his, Victim’s, life. This is revealed to Middling in a cache of cassette recordings, which Middling then uses to eavesdrop on their many and extensive conversations. Since neither is adept at using the recorder they record just about everything, and then just about nothing.
As Middling listens he grows to identify with Victim as his professional veneer falls away in the tutorial and he reveals more and more of his self to Chair, and she reciprocates. This illicit affair is consummated in the attic office they are using, and his death is a result of (hard to believe) circumstances that occur there, thanks to a number of coinciding plot devices.
The title is a metaphor for the unusual and exhilarating experience the two have of their sexual liaison.
In the vicarious experience Middling has of their flight he reflected on his own laboured existence which continues. By the way, I never did quite figure out what become of the Chair. Maybe I nodded off on that pages.
It is a nice parody of an Ordinary Language philosophy tutorial. Note to the uninitiated ‘Ordinary Language’ philosophy was ‘ordinary’ to the same degree that ‘Reality television’ is ‘reality.’ It was the dominant mode of English philosophy for two generations after World War II. In it ‘ordinary’ language use was subjected to a pitiless analysis of infinite regress. It dominated my own graduate education.
The Chair is feckless and more than a little naive, and Middling’s reaction to her is very civil service, trying to curb her enthusiasms and manoeuvre her into the safe and sane channels, but, well, the self-analysis she elicits from him crumbles that prim and proper facade.
Michael Frayn haș published many books to much acclaim.