Uncumber in the Detritosphere

A VERY PRIVATE LIFE by Michael Frayn. 132 pages. Viking. $4.50.

Britain's Michael Frayn has switched in the past few years from professional satirist--funny once a week in the London Observer--to novelist. Few writers have managed that transition successfully, and even fewer with Frayn's apparently effortless assurance. His first three novels (The Tin Men, The Russian Interpreter and Against Entropy) dealt humorously enough with contemporary life. His fourth is bolder and by no means funny.

A Very Private Life is set in the distant future, at a time when a technological civilization has developed beyond the wildest dreams of 20th century man. Rather, it has developed precisely as a good many current dreams predict: a detritosphere, made up of atomized waste products and the debris of innumerable satellite disasters, smothers the globe. The sun has been stifled, the sea polluted. The earth itself is encrusted with a layer of rubble. The human race has retreated into sealed, windowless cells serviced by tube and tap. All outside contact is hygienically transmitted over an infinitely sophisticated kind of television, which provides everything at the press of a button--from sex to seaside holidays, from the most exquisite physical sensation to the tang and even the feel of the sea. Life has become a painless, effortless, synthetically carefree adman's paradise. Meanwhile, the dirty work--garbage collection, refuse disposal, food production--is left to a wretched race of slaves, still living in hopelessly primitive and unsanitary 20th century conditions.

False Security. This sort of thing, or something very like it, has been done often enough before, from H. G. Wells' time machines to Stanley Kubrick's space odyssey. Moreover, Frayn's first sentence--"Once upon a time there will be a little girl called Uncumber"--gets the whole thing off to a bad start. Sure enough, Uncumber has a mother called Frideswide and a father called Aelfric. The coyly chosen names and the uneasy use of the future tense suggest a particularly tiresome and traditionally British kind of whimsy.

But Frayn employs the whimsy with considerable cunning, soothing the reader into a false sense of security. Creating a kind of Alice in Wonderland in reverse, he shows a powerful and peculiar imagination. Like Alice, Uncumber leaves her safe, dull, comfortable home. But where Alice retreats down a tunnel from a world of horsehair sofas and bullying grownups, Uncumber escapes onto the surface of the earth itself. Like Alice, she is both alarmed and enraptured by what she finds. Her first stunted blade of grass delights her. She sits entranced for hours, watching oily, scum-covered waves lapping at a blackened shore. The whole world--a hideous desert of slag heaps, ashpits, garbage, swamping flies and choking, poisonous vapors--holds for her an absorbing and mysterious fascination. Even the contaminated sea is infinitely more exciting, and more satisfying, than the blue waters, golden sands and fake sea spray of her synthetic seaside at home. Her first sexual contacts and her first experience of human brutality have a weird and frightening intensity.

Enigmatic Fable. Uncumber's return to the painless world from which she started has a curious effect on the reader. It is not simply that this luxurious futuristic paradise seems less real than the squalor and desolation on the earth's surface. It is rather that the reader has seen the squalor with fresh eyes. To Uncumber, a heap of maggots or an oily wave was new, astonishing, even romantic. In Frayn's crisp prose, these things seem strangely romantic to the reader, too. This enigmatic little fable confirms Michael Frayn's position as one of the few worthwhile novelists writing in Britain today.

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