FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved

Books by Lachlan Mackintosh Headlong by Michael Frayn Faber and Faber, 394 pp. It’s been a good couple of years for Michael Frayn. His 13th play, Copenhagen, opened in May 1998 and has enjoyed a critically acclaimed two-year run in London’s West End. At the same time, his ninth novel, Headlong, was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize. While Copenhagen is a taut historical drama that investigates the 1941 meeting between German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish counterpart, Niels Bohr, Headlong is much lighter stuff – part comedy of art history manners, and part mystery, involving a long lost Bruegel and the murky English countryside. Frayn opens Headlong with Kate, Martin and baby Tilda leaving London, headed north. Frayn’s couple are thirtysomething academics – Martin in philosophy (nominalism) and Kate in art history (comparative Christian iconography). Early in the novel Martin discovers what he thinks is the answer to one of art history’s great mysteries – a missing Bruegel, which would complete the season cycle painted in 1565. But complications abound. The painting in question resides within the dilapidated estate of the nearly unhinged Tony Churt and his alluring wife, Laura. The bulk of the book is occupied with Martin’s efforts to extract the painting without ever revealing what he believes it to be. As the novel progresses, Frayn devises a love triangle which verges on the absurd, with Martin in the middle, his obsession for the Bruegel on the one side, and Laura’s burgeoning interest in him on the other. Frayn covers this fertile ground in a fast-paced and humourous way. But what really makes the novel work is Frayn’s successful immersion of Martin in the world of art history. Martin, as well as most readers, is not an authority on 16th century art or political history. But he is a quick study, and becomes hopelessly, obsessively pulled along not just by his need to possess the longed for Bruegel, but by his need to understand the mystery of Bruegel, "one of those many things that can’t be painted."

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