Unlike Frayn's The Tin Men, published three years earlier, this is a more serious SF novel, in both senses of the phrase. Very much in the vein of "The Machine Stops", this is a fable, introduced in the future tense, though the present tense is used for most of this short novel. The tropes are old -- the rich live comfortably in isolated houses, in contact with each other by holovision. Seldom seen outsiders maintain everything. Pills are taken to engender most moods. Sex with a companion is basically an advanced form of phone sex. Babies are ordered on-line -- you send in the materials and a baby is returned. Also standard is the main character, Uncumber, a girl about 16 or so, who is rebellious and eventually finds her way outside. Her journey into the outside world and the lives of the outsiders though avoids most of the cliches. She is ignorant and naive but, like Candide, endures some fairly harrowing experiences. Like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, she does learn so much as mature and accept. The theme is isolation and a constant failure to communicate. Even when Uncumber is physically amid people, they speak languages neither she nor I understand.

Recommend unless you have an aversion to morality plays. ( )

Michael Frayn wrote "A Very Private Life" in 1968. My Dell paperback edition just came off of the shelf to be reread. It's not uninteresting but there are better stories of its type.

I do like the opening sentence:"Once upon a time there will be a little girl called Uncumber. ( )

Given my passion is young adult distopian fiction, I approached this Michael Frayn novel with some trepidation - it could be brilliant, or it could have been quite cruelly mocking of so many books I hold dear.

It is wafer-thin, and I devoured it in about an hour. It has a very light touch - the quote on the front says 'a fairy tale of the future' and it has that simplistic, sweet style that borders on the saccarine. However, the sweetness is tainted with Frayn's wry knowingness.

I think my main problem with this book (and I think with others of Frayn's) is that he never really seems to like any of his characters. He is razor sharp at observing our foolishness and our hypocracy, but his portraits of headstrong, silly, teenage Uncumber, or old, balding Noli, or all Cumby's foolish family are cruel and lack sympathy.

Except despite that, I do feel sympathetic to them all (and frustrated at Frayn's depressing ending, and pleased that he left in that one tiny chink of hope), and they feel so terribly human - not characters from a novel, heros, having adventures and fixing things, but just normal people trying to make sense of the world they find themselves in.

The book is notable for being written in the late 60s, but not having dated too much as a dystopia. And it is a fascinating example of how you can tell very similar stories for very different reasons / morals, and end up with utterly different books, when you compare it to more typical 'YA' adventures. It would be fun to see this as a set text to be compared against Delirium. It is much more self aware and tongue-in-cheak than Delirium - but maybe I am still naive enough that I prefer a page turning romp with a hope of making things better...

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A re-read during lockdown because of COVID-19 - the book feels very close, with the lower class workers Outside, and the rich Insiders shielded from everything never leaving their warm, comfortable houses. ( )

thought provoking, enjoyable. ( )

More of a novella, really, this is a fantastic little book set in an unspecified future earth. Our hero is the teenage Uncumber who is an "Insider", a member of the thinking class. She has never been outside - noone she knows ever has - she meets others through holovision and all of her experiences are provided by pills (which dictate her moods and feelings) and holovisual images which are her social life and even her holidays.

Like all the best heroes, she is a rebel. She longs to experience the "real world" but her forays "outside" are just too frightening. So her teenage angst plays out in the increasingly clastrophobic confines of her nuclear family. Until, of course, she falls in love and (in search of her "outsider") she decides to have an adventure.

Frayn has taken a simple idea and made it all-too-real and frighteningly possible. His society has developed as a result of increasing governmental control over hard-to-control society (sounds familiar?). People feared Big Brother, and their total loss of freedom. "But what in fact happened was exactly the opposite. Everything became private. People recognised the corruption of indiscriminate human contact. Whoever could afford it built a wall around himself and his family to keep out society and its demands." Scary stuff.

There is a lot going on in this short book and it grips and entertains in equal measure. Recommended.