A bit of slap and tickle

Hard on the heels of the ecstatically received London revival of Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (currently playing at the Novello Theatre) comes this hilarious novel. It’s not easy to pull off farce on the printed page when so many of the laughs of the genre generally depend upon physical comedy. In Noises Off, for example, one character hops about the stage like a demented kangaroo, his shoelaces tied together. But just as a filthy joke is made funnier when told by an apparently po-faced academic, so a really silly plot is enlivened when composed by a highly clever author.

Frayn is that man. In the hands of someone less accomplished, the events in Skios would be too improbable, its characterisation too thin, its reliance on that old trope, mistaken identity, just too plain daft. As it is, you can sit back and let the book lap over you like the warm waters surrounding the imaginary Greek isle of the title.

This is perfect holiday reading, funny and light. The novel’s only flaw is that the story takes a few chapters to get going. Indeed, I began to wonder if we’d ever get out of the airport. But of course the whole point of farce is that everything which possibly could go wrong must go wrong. And things can’t go wrong convincingly unless we first establish what should have been happening had everything gone to plan. Setting up the house of cards takes time and patience, while watching it tumble is quick
work.

A woman who runs what amounts to a luxury cultural holiday camp on the island goes to collect her keynote speaker from his plane. The keynote speaker, pompous and very probably a bit of a bore, lands and goes to the luggage carousel.