Michael Frayn’s Skios
is both fun and funny, an entertaining farce about mistaken identity at a Fred
Toppler Foundation conference—“Innovation and Governance: The Promise of
Scientometrics”—for a bunch of schmoozing jetsetters and would-be intellectuals who gather on a fictional Greek island. Skios
tells the story of two Dr. Norman Wilfreds and the silly havoc they wreak on
themselves and the people around them.
The passport-proven Norman Wilfred is scheduled to lecture at the conference about
the management of science… but ends up at a distant house on Skios instead of the lavish conference site after being mistaken for one Oliver
Fox. The ersatz Norman Wilfred, whose real name is, yes, Oliver Fox, is coming
to Skios for a fling but decides to become Dr. Wilfred when he sees a woman
holding a Norman Wilfred sign at the airport and decides “that would have been
a good name to have.” Fox-Wilfred also sees that Nikki Hook, the woman greeting
him, “plainly wanted him to be Dr. Wilfred.” Fox-Wilfred isn’t one to disappoint.
There are many layers of humor lurking in Skios, from the repetition of identity-based gags—like Spiros and Stavros, brothers and taxi drivers, who
think real-Wilfred must be “Phoksoliva,” which real-Wilfred thinks must be a Greek expression—to a receptionist answering the phone by saying “How my dreck your call?” And then there’s satire involving
empty-headed conference attendees, who are all too eager to believe that
Fox-Wilfred is real-Wilfred. Even if they’ve met him in the past.
Identity in Skios is
all about belief and labels, that people fit the labels they present; this
plays nicely on contemporary thought that something will happen if you believe in
it enough. Perhaps what’s most telling on Skios is that the person at the conference who
most pesters Fox-Wilfred, asking him real scientific questions, is shunted
aside over and over because he’s inconvenient: maintaining the illusion of
Fox-Wilfred is more comfortable. Of course the illusion is also entertaining and
suspenseful for the reader, as when Fox-Wilfred comes up with an absurd and
messy magician-like act with coffee cups in an attempt to evade answering the
questions.
There is plenty more illusion, fake, ersatz, and faux in Skios, from Nikki’s blond hair to a
Russian woman’s apparent lack of English: Mrs. Toppler, the former Vegas dancer
who heads the foundation, tells Fox-Wilfred to entertain one Mrs. Skorbatova at
dinner by just talking, telling him, “A mouth opening and shutting. That’s all
most people here want, when you come right down to it. Plus one of your nice
smiles.”
Frayn ends the novel with far more of a semiotic bang than
I’d expected. He sets it off with a careless action (involving sweets) that
spurs an utterance—an English word that has multiple meanings—that prompts an inappropriate
reaction. This misunderstanding has much, much worse consequences than the Fox-Wilfred
matter but Frayn still manages to end the book on a humorous note, with Mrs.
Toppler thanking her conference guests. Everything is only what you say it is.
Skios, by the way,
was long-listed
for the Booker Prize last week. Skios
is listed on the Macmillan Web site here, with a brief
excerpt.
Up Next: Andreï
Makine’s The Life of an Unknown Man. Then
G. Willow Wilson’s Alif the Unseen.
Disclaimers: I
received a review copy of Skios from
the publisher, Henry Holt. Thank you!