SOURCE: Hensher, Philip. “The Ruthless Grip of Language.” Spectator 288, no. 9068 (25 May 2002): 39-40.

In the following essay, Hensher discusses what he perceives as the central theme throughout Frayn's columns, novels, and plays—a concern with the problematic relationships between people and language.

Michael Frayn has been awarded this year's Heywood Hill Prize, and nobody is going to argue with that. The prize is not for an individual work, but in recognition of a complete and distinguished literary career. Frayn's career has been a remarkable one; cogent and unified, pursuing single ideas with seemingly infinite resourcefulness and variation, raising grave and profound questions with an unfailing surface of grace and elegance. His audience, from the start, has been treated with great respect; readers of his early columns for the Observer, or his comic novels of the 1960s, or the audiences at his romping theatrical entertainments, have always been presented with...