A Landing on the Sun

by Michael Frayn

Book Overview

From the bestselling author of Headlong and Spies, "an unconditional triumph" (The Washington Post Book World)

For fifteen years, ever since the taciturn civil servant Summerchild fell to his death from a window in the Admiralty, there have been rumors.

So Brian Jessel, a young member of the Cabinet Office, is diverted from his routine work and asked to prepare an internal report. Slowly, from the archives...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312421907
• ISBN13: 9780312421908
• Release Date: December 2003
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Length: 259 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Highly accomplished

With its enticing blend of sex, death, Establishment politics and academic philosophy (in this case the theory of happiness), the setup for this intriguing novel sounds like something by Ian McEwan. But Frayn brings to it his trademark sense of humor, so it never quite gets into the same territory. The comic aspects of an unlikely love affair between a devious public servant and the Oxford academic who is also his boss are fully exploited, providing a nice counterpoint to the more intellectually engaging philosophical material. In that sense, this novel makes a nice companion piece to Frayn's two most recent efforts - "Headlong" and "Spies" - both of which similarly deploy comic plots as devices for discussing more serious concerns. In the right hands, this kind of thing can really work. Frayn consistently manages to pull it off because he makes clever narrative choices. Here, he uses the first-person narration of an investigator, the transcripts of meetings, and audio tapes of the lovers to tell a story which unfolds in two timeframes. He also sets up an intriguing mystery - Who killed Stephen Summerchild? - to pull you through. Highly original and engaging, this should appeal to readers who prefer literary fiction but also enjoy the intrigue and pacing of crime/mystery novels. It's a challenging fusion of the two.

a quiet, unassuming little masterpiece

This book is a strange, finely crafted, sometimes very funny, deliberation about beaurocracy, philosophy, love and insanity.

A perfect masterpiece

I cannot find that any reviewer has properly taken the measure of the virtuosity of this work, apart from any of its other merits. Frayn anchors Jessel in the very same place as Serafin and Summerchild, the two people whose history he is investigating, and from that conceptual base he goes out on forays into differences of time and of identity. Jessel plays and experiments with abolishing those differences, but the sameness of place is flatly literal. It's delicious. --As well as the interplays between his time frame and theirs, and between his identity and theirs, there is the interplay between his happiness and theirs; and, for good measure, Frayn explores the interplays amongst these other interplays. All of this finely interwoven, never tangled; so funny and so sad; and bound together with a terrific detective story. --Frayn makes a brilliant job of making us believe (in a way) Jessel's own representation of himself as a dry, grey, prosaic civil servant, while also showing us how lively and responsive a mind he has. --The philosophy tutorials are wonderful: a lot of mockery, but also some real philosophy. Frayn makes the unlikely love between Serafin and Summerchild seem almost inevitable: all it took was an exchange of truly personal reminiscences, their sheer intimacy being the magnet that pulls the two people towards one another. --This is the most complex thing Frayn has ever done; he ran fearful risks with it; and the upshot is a triumphant, dazzling success. `

sweet, haunting, intense

I read this book almost a year ago, but even at this distance I can say it haunts me. When I think of books I've loved, this is certainly one. In structure, it reminded me a little of AS Byatt's Possession (if not quite that complicated). It's smart and funny about the lives of civil servants, and keeps your sympathies shifting and swelling. A brilliant book.

An intense account of the positive/negative power of love

A Landing on the Sun is the story of love run amok, of love consuming a person's life to the point of disaster. Anyone who has ever been in love knows it can be like that; it can overrule all common sense. This book is the depiction of the (literal) downfall of a British Civil Servant, Stephen Summerchild, who falls in love with his superior, a philosopher investigating the meaning of "the good life" for a newly elected British government. The narrator is another Civil Servant investigating Summerchild's death years later. The mystery of Summerchild's death is slowly unraveled by means of an overlooked cache of audio tapes made by the couple in the course of their research. The reader can gradually witness them coming apart emotionally under the strain of their forbidden relationship until disaster overtakes them. The outcome is bittersweet in the end for all romantics, but incredibly draining as the best of story telling always is. If you treasure love stories, this is one of the best.