The Content Reader

This is a review also for Book beginnings on Friday. The third week of June, and there it is again: the same almost embarrassingly familiar breath of sweetness that comes every year about this time. I catch it on the warm evening air as I walk past the well-ordered gardens in my quiet street, and for a moment I’m a child again and everything’s before me – all the frightening, half-understood promise of life. This is the beginning of this wonderful book by Michael Frayn. Frayn is a very active writer and has written both fiction, plays and for television. His prose is simple but beautiful and very descriptive. The story is simple but he still manages to keep you attention all through the book and it is even difficult to put it down because you think there will be a rational explanation in the end. The two boys Keith and Stephen are best friends, living in the same street and only having each other. Stephen is the old man in the introduction above who goes back to his ch...