SOURCE: Banville, John. “Playing House.” New York Review of Books 39, no. 9 (14 May 1992): 41-3.

In the following review, Banville argues that A Landing on the Sun effectively displays Frayn's talents for comedy, but notes that the plot is overly contrived in some places.

The novel is as English as roast beef or the monarchy, a national institution which in a declining age must be stoutly defended against skeptics and foreigners. By “novel” here I mean the novel of manners, that essentially middle-class form perfected by the great Victorians. The present British prime minister, John Major, has claimed to have read all of Trollope (a prodigious feat, considering that author's vast output); the claim sounds more like an act of patriotic piety than of literary preference. (One of Mr. Major's more colorful and certainly wittier predecessors, Harold Macmillan, liked to observe that it was always a pleasure to go to...