To his dearest friends and funniest acquaintances
about whom Frayn writes with tremendous care and understanding: friends, lovers, acquaintances, and some people “simply because the memory of them amused me”. Thus, there is
Dame Elizabeth Hill, professor of Slavonic studies and director of the Joint Services School for Linguists, who taught Frayn Russian (and whose first marriage came at the age of 84 to a Serbian baron, whom she divorced aged 95). There is the journalist Neal Ascherson, dashing and brave; the theatre director and accomplished body-surfer Michael Blakemore; Bamber Gascoigne, perhaps Frayn’s dearest friend, dashing Old Etonian and host of University Challenge; angry playwright Peter Nichols, author of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg; and Sarah Haffner the painter, an early love, with whom Frayn enjoyed a “slightly wary friendship” that lasted for 30 years, though “always coloured by the memory of what it once was, and that always requires a certain amount of mutual tact”.
There is much tact displayed throughout, not least in an extraordinary chapter about Frayn’s brilliant childhood friend David, who ended up working as a glamour photographer and who eventually committed suicide, the victim of an appalling bully of a father, who, Frayn writes, had managed to turn “my friend’s advantages in life to dust, devalued his skills and imagination, undermined his self-confidence and poisoned his pleasure in the world” – perhaps the only words of bitterness and recrimination in the whole book.
With Frayn now approaching 90, Among Others feels like a summing-up and is also a fine example of late style, that last period in life in which writers and artists occasionally achieve a kind of clear-eyed serenity. The final chapter of the book explores Frayn’s relationship with his own body, in decline and decay, with characteristic amusement and insight. As he writes of Eric Korn, who ended his life suffering from dementia in a care home: “From all that teeming main of knowledge, all that quickness, all that invention, all that fun, all that fame, all that sheer cleverness – not a trace was left. Nothing except a few stranded specimens like these, collected and preserved in the memories of his surviving friends.” A forgetme-not composed as a series of forget-me-nots: this is Frayn’s final ingenious piece of work.