Skios: A Review
In another of the reviews of novels longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2012, I now turn to: Michael Frayn has nothing left to prove. Already an award-winning playwright and novelist, he won over the critics many years ago. He is well known for his farces – the play Noises Off, his 1999 novel Headlong, for instance – and Skios doesn’t do anything to change this reputation. This is a farce of basest kind, and all the better for it. The plot of Skios is tough to summarise: let’s just say that two men arrive on the Greek island of Skios, one for a date, the other to give a talk, and through a simple act of misrepresentation by one, they end up switching lives. I believe Frayn has gone on record as saying he wanted to see if a theatrical farce could work on the page, as a novel – and this is the best description of how Skios works. It is a theatrical farce that would work really well with actors to bring it all to life. In ...