Michael Frayn's new novel comes disguised as a memory of boyhood experience during the last war, the friendship between a bewildered, inarticulate state-school boy and a boy from further down the street whose frightening father imposes an officer-class discipline on his apparently perfectly balanced household. The unravelling by the boys of a wartime mystery among the other residents of The Close (aptly named) at first seems to be the spark of the book; a tragic episode inside the greater conflict, quickly put aside, if never resolved. 'Not everything then was reported or spoken about.'
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