SOURCE: Mackenzie, Mary Margaret. “A Question of Happiness.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4615 (13 September 1991): 21.

In the following review, Mackenzie asserts that although many of the characters in A Landing on the Sun are irritating stereotypes, Frayn skillfully blends the genres of philosophy and literature in the novel.

The first joke is on you. A Landing on the Sun pretends, at the start; to be a political thriller—Summerchild, a civil servant working in a secret Strategy Unit in the new Wilson Government of 1974, falls to his death from a building in Whitehall; his connections with espionage are denied. Then Jessel, another civil servant brought in to investigate the case fifteen years later, finds that the evidence has been hidden or mislaid. What killed Summerchild?

Then you discover that this is one of the new genre of “research” novels—it describes Jessel's reconstruction, from ancient files and secret tapes, of...