An Eye for Absurdity

Village fêtes are dangerous places to buy books. The conviction that somewhere among the ancient almanacs and dog-eared Jilly Coopers lurks an underpriced treasure is so strong that I find it hard to come away empty-handed, and habitually end up with a selection of curios I will never read. But now and again I strike lucky, as I did with my 1966 first edition of Michael Frayn’s The Russian Interpreter.

Two things attracted me to it: I had read and loved another of Frayn’s early novels, Towards the End of the Morning, and my girlfriend (now wife) was a translator from Russian. The book didn’t leave me much the wiser about the language, but it did afford me a great deal of laughter – a rare achievement for a novel set in Moscow at the height of the Cold War. I had interviewed Frayn a year before and noticed that a poster for Wild Honey (his translation of an early play by Chekhov) had pride of place in his hallway. I knew that he had been taught Russian while doing national service, but only learned much later that he had been a frequent visitor to the USSR in the Fifties and Sixties – which explains why his portrait of a maddening city where everything is ‘unnecessarily complicated, never more than half explained’ is so convincing. The book’s protagonist, Paul Manning, is a Cambridge graduate completing his studies in Administrative Management Sciences at Moscow University. Weighed down by the glumness of his surroundings, he finds life made suddenly more interesting by the arrival of a mysterious compatriot. Frayn’s opening paragraph brilliantly sets the tone for the novel, its words dancing an elegant, convoluted quadrille which foreshadows the spirals of the plot:

Manning’s old friend Proctor-Gould was in Moscow, and anxious to get in touch with him. Or so Manning was informed. He looked forward to the meeting. He had few friends in Moscow, none of them old friends, and no friends at all, old or new, in Moscow or anywhere else, called Proctor-Gould.

When the two finally meet, Proctor-Gould proves far from the smooth operator Paul has come to expect. Moon-faced and seedy in appearance, his drink of choice is not a vodka Martini but Nescafé; his chief characteristic is a nervous tugging of his ear lobe. As for his business, its exact nature is the question mark at the centre of the book: does he really, as he claims, recruit ordinary Russians to give their views to the Western media? Paul immediately wonders whether he is a spy – but cannot conceive of a less likely one. Persuaded to act as Proctor-Gould’s interpreter, Paul joins him on a round of official functions; but when he is asked to assist in his private affairs, the job becomes more challenging. On a country excursion Paul falls for the beautiful Raya, only to see her transfer her affections to Proctor-Gould and install herself in his hotel room. Since Raya speaks no English, Paul has to act as their go-between; and when Raya starts stealing Proctor-Gould’s possessions, the situation becomes more complicated still. Given Frayn’s later success with Noises Off, it isn’t surprising that The Russian Interpreter has a strong element of farce. Raya’s thefts become a wonderful running gag – no sooner has one object been recovered than another disappears – which is all the funnier because she makes no attempt to conceal or excuse them. When Proctor-Gould tries to protect some precious books by locking them in his luggage, Raya solves the problem by walking off with an entire suitcase. The whole premise of the novel is, of course, rich in comic possibilities. On the one hand there is the inability of two people to make any sense of each other; on the other, the interpreter’s freedom to take liberties with the messages he is asked to convey.

‘Gordon is a good judge of women,’ she said. ‘He knows how to appreciate them, and how to deal with them. Tell him so.’

‘She says you know how to suck up to people,’ Manning told Proctor-Gould sourly.

In the book’s most hilarious scene, Paul drinks too much at a tedious faculty dinner and reduces Proctor-Gould’s fulsome speech to two sentences – only to find to his horror that he has delivered them in English rather than Russian. Frayn also treats us to some brilliant similes (‘He threw the words away casually, almost surreptitiously, as if they were old sweet wrappers he was disposing of in the street’) and excellent deadpan jokes:

From the loudspeakers among the trees came the slow movement of a violin concerto, austere and heartbreaking. On such a morning people walked gravely with a sense that the world was well-ordered and poignant.

‘That music, Paul,’ sighed Proctor-Gould. ‘The whole soul of Russia is in it.’

‘It’s Bach,’ said Manning shortly.

But the novel also has a darker side. Like Kafka, Frayn understands that the dividing line between farce and horror is a thin one, and when Paul is arrested he struggles – despite his innocence – to find a version of his strange story that will not incriminate him. In a country where the rights of the individual count for nothing, his requests to speak to the British Embassy or be told what charges he faces begin to sound ridiculous even to himself. Frayn has serious points, too, to make about the use of language. Proctor-Gould may be helpless in his private conversations with Raya, but he is able to make headway with the Soviet authorities because he uses the same abstract, impersonal phrases they do (‘the cultural treasure house we share’, ‘setting our barren suspicions and fears behind us’). The Russian characters, meanwhile, struggle in a world of communist jargon: Paul’s dissident friend Katerina is chillingly hampered by ‘a record of negative contribution’. Katerina is the book’s most engaging character, and her presence is a homage to the Russian tradition of philosophical novels: between his adventures with Proctor-Gould, Paul roams the streets with her discussing the nature of the universe. But whereas Dostoevsky’s characters are happy to go on musing for page after page, Katerina has the gift of encapsulating her thoughts in a few memorable sentences. When Paul tells her that he cannot understand her perception of God, she replies, ‘Nor do I. We couldn’t expect to. All we can do is venture descriptions of Him which give rise to unfathomable infinities and unresolvable contradictions, and to contemplate these with humility.’ For me, one of the fascinating things about the novel is the way it prefigures a play Frayn was to write thirty years later. In Copenhagen’s most striking scene, a walk taken by the physicist Heisenberg is compared with the movement of an electron through a cloud chamber. In The Russian Interpreter Paul imagines ‘himself, Katya, and the people crowding off trolley-buses . . . as nothing but a complexly interbalanced network of electrical charges’. Later he reflects on the strangeness of human beings: ‘How odd and unfamiliar were the relations between them, like the interactions of half-understood particles beneath the microscope.’ The Russian Interpreter also curiously anticipates today’s reality TV culture. ‘The Press and television’, Proctor-Gould tells Paul, ‘want to get away from the professionals. They want to get at the real flesh-and-blood people who make up the other 99.9% of the world.’ He adds that ‘everyone has . . . a personality the public would be interested to explore’ (an idea that Andy Warhol would define two years later as ‘famous for fifteen minutes’). Paul’s head of department responds incisively and refreshingly: ‘I must tell you frankly, being a personality in your sense seems to me a little like being a prostitute.’ If The Russian Interpreter is impressively prophetic, it is also a valuable time capsule. The system that seemed immovable forty-five years ago has gone, and the cityscape of Moscow is changing; but should future generations wish to picture the capital of communism in its heyday, they will find few better descriptions than this:

He crossed the great empty plaza in front of the university, watched impassively by the gigantic gimcrack statues thirty floors above of women grasping hammers and cog-wheels. Everything seemed enormous and out-of-scale . . . Beyond the plaza, in a formal vista of ornamental gardens, solitary pedestrians moved like Bedouin, separated from one another by Saharas of empty brown flower-bed and drying tarmacadam. They were so small they seemed merely an infestation. The authorities should have put human-being powder down and got rid of them.

Frayn’s recent memoir My Father’s Fortune gives only tantalizing glimpses of the period of his life in which he wrote this novel. Rereading The Russian Interpreter made me hungry for a fuller autobiography, recounting his own adventures in the Soviet Union. With his brilliant eye for absurdity, it is the land he was born to write about.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 38 © Anthony Gardner 2013