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    Skios
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    Skios
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    Skios
    Audiobook7 hours

    Skios

    Written by Michael Frayn

    Narrated by Robin Sachs

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    On the private Greek island of Skios, the high-paying guests of a world-renowned foundation prepare for the annual keynote address, to be given this year by Dr. Norman Wilfred, an eminent authority on the scientific organization of science. He turns out to be surprisingly youthful, handsome, and. Everyone is soon eating out of his hands. So, even sooner, is Nikki, the foundation's attractive and efficient organizer. Meanwhile, Nikki's old friend Georgie has rashly agreed to spend a furtive horizontal weekend with a notorious schemer. Trapped there with her instead is a pompous, balding individual called Dr. Norman Wilfred, who has lost his whereabouts, his luggage, his temper - indeed, everything he possesses other than the text of a lecture on the scientific organization of science.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateJun 19, 2012
    ISBN9781611208764
    Unavailable
    Skios
    Author

    Michael Frayn

    Michael Frayn is the author of ten novels, including the bestselling Headlong, which was a New York Times Editors' Choice selection and a Booker Prize finalist, and Spies, which received the Whitbread Novel Award. He has also written a memoir, My Father's Fortune, and fifteen plays, among them Noises Off and Copenhagen, which won three Tony Awards. He lives just south of London.

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    Reviews for Skios

    3/5

    217 ratings32 reviews

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    • 2/5
      This book features a happy-go lucky gigolo, Oliver Fox, who winds up allowing himself to be mistaken for someone else. The someone else, Dr Norman Wilfred, happens to be an expert in his field and is due to deliver the key note speech at a conference. Fox, being a charming good looker with a cavalier attitude, reckons he can pull it off himself. The payoff of the fancy resort, an attractive helper, feeling famous and avoiding an irate girlfriend all rolled into one, is just too much to resist.If you want to look deeper (and it is optional) you might find a story about image; about peoples inventing and reinventing themselves, about superficiality and about the Butterfly Effect. But for me, if the author wanted to write about these things then he could have done so in a less farcical way. The comedy of it all didn't appeal to me, I just found it silly and flippant. I thought the two main characters annoying and couldn't have cared a jot about anyone else either.It makes me wonder if some Booker Prize nominations are given for those who hang around long enough.
    • 2/5
      Reads like a contractual obligation; no heart; no meaning. Superficially (just) amusing.
    • 1/5
      A shocker. Poor Farce. Uninteresting. It was an achievement (of some sorts) finishing it. Would I recommend it? Yes!!! (to an enemy). I struggled to understand the ridiculous story line, if indeed there was one. I read Spies and enjoyed it as a novel. However this left me making a note to self - Do not read any more Michael Frayn!
    • 3/5
      A light, tight British farce. Reminded me of David Lodge's _Small World_ very much, and in a good way.
    • 3/5
      Michael Frayn's farce of mistaken identity taking place on a beautiful Greek island. Lovers of Frayn's play, "Noises Off" will likely like this as well. While a pleasant and entertaining read, I am puzzled by the Booker Prize nomination. Perhaps they wanted to appear as if in on the joke about academic pretension.
    • 2/5
      Michael Frayn seems to be able to flit between literary genres at will, and he seems equally at home writing novels or for the stage. His previous works includes philosophical dramas such as [Copenhagen] and the farcical [Noises Off], while his novels include [Towards the End of the Morning] (perhaps THE great novel about the Fleet Street heyday of journalism), [Headlong] (which brings the world of fine art into a comic modern day focus) and [Spies], a marvellous rites of passage novel about young boys growing up against the backdrop of the Second World War.With this latest novel he returns to the world of farce. Oliver Fox is down on his luck and has just flown into Skios where he hopes to spend a week with Georgie, a young woman whom he had first met just a few days earlier. However, just before his plane lands he receives a text message from Georgie to say that she had missed her plane and won't be arriving until the next day. Annoyed, he snatches what he thinks is his case from the luggage carousel and proceeds out into the terminal where he sees a very attractive woman holding a sign saying "Dr Norman Wilfred". Feeling he has nothing to lose he decides to try his luck and pretends to be Dr Wilfred, and he is whisked away to the Toppler Foundation where he learns that he is expected to deliver a keynote speech on "scientometrics" the following day. By an amazing coincidence he also realises that he had picked up the wrong suitcase and is now in possession of the hapless Dr Wilfred's clothes, too.Meanwhile the real Dr Wilfred has found himself without luggage, and with no-one to meet him. Annoyed at the blow that fate seems to have dealt him, and further exasperated by the lack of support from any of the officials around the airport, he lurches out of the airport to find a solitary taxi who has been waiting for "Fox, Oliver", though he pronounces it as one word, "Phoxoliva". Wilfred tries to explain that he is meant to be going to the Toppler Foundation but the driver fails to understand, and assumes that he is indeed the passenger whom he had been commissioned to meet, and drives him off to the villa that Fox was due to stay at. Wilfred and Fox then stumble through the next couple of days living each other's lives. In fact, shades of [A Comedy of Errors], just sadly without the comedy.All potentially amusing but rather clumsily handled. In fact, all the way through I had the feeling that Frayn had had the germ of an idea but hadn't put sufficient effort in to bring it to full fruition. The overwhelming thought that I had throughout the book was a wistful pondering of "what might have been".
    • 2/5
      This book features a happy-go lucky gigolo, Oliver Fox, who winds up allowing himself to be mistaken for someone else. The someone else, Dr Norman Wilfred, happens to be an expert in his field and is due to deliver the key note speech at a conference. Fox, being a charming good looker with a cavalier attitude, reckons he can pull it off himself. The payoff of the fancy resort, an attractive helper, feeling famous and avoiding an irate girlfriend all rolled into one, is just too much to resist.If you want to look deeper (and it is optional) you might find a story about image; about peoples inventing and reinventing themselves, about superficiality and about the Butterfly Effect. But for me, if the author wanted to write about these things then he could have done so in a less farcical way. The comedy of it all didn't appeal to me, I just found it silly and flippant. I thought the two main characters annoying and couldn't have cared a jot about anyone else either.It makes me wonder if some Booker Prize nominations are given for those who hang around long enough.
    • 2/5
      I didn't find any of these characters to be sympathetic and thought the ending a violent cop-out.
    • 1/5
      A mediocre sitcom-like farce about the culture industry. Story of no consequence. Language of no consequence. Too flimsy and too superficial to be a satire over superficiality. Time is too valuable to spend on this.
    • 2/5
      Cringeworthy.Having thoroughly enjoyed Spies by Michael Frayn, I have not found the other books that I've read by him to be anywhere near as good. Skios was no exception. It was full of irritatingly stupid people with no idea where they are or what they are supposed to be doing. It was better suited to a play in the genre of farce, which I would then avoid.The main character is Oliver Fox, who decides to take on the identity of Dr Norman Wilfred, simply because he takes a fancy to the young lady holding a placard bearing that name at Skios airport. It turns out that Dr Norman Wilfred is due to give an important speech at the Toppler Foundation and VIPs have come from all over the world to hear it. Oliver Fox is a bit of a stand-up commedian and manages to fool many of the VIPs by waffling a lot of nonsense.Meanwhile, the real Dr Norman Wilfred finds himself at a villa with the young lady who Oliver Fox was supposed to liaise with for an illicit weekend. Needless to say she is not impressed to find this elderly gentleman in her bed.After a lot of screaming and flat or lost mobile phones, some sort of a solution evolves. By this time I was so bored and frustrated that I was not in the slightest bit interested.I listened to this as an unabridged audiobook, if I had been reading it I would have abandoned it and given it just one star. This has been my worst read so far this year and I have no idea what it was doing in the Booker Long List.Also read by Michael Frayn:Spies (5 stars)Headlong (3 stars)Sweet Dreams (2 stars)
    • 4/5
      Brilliant! Fast paced. Masterful writer in any/all his genres. Frayne can match anyone in wrestling our deluded, ego-clogged society to its shamed knees; yet he does it with such grace, plus great wit & writing skills. These replace the need for the usual cynicism or malice. Madly dazzling finalé. Treat yourselves to lots of unsupressible laughs this summer.
    • 4/5
      Ach war das schön! Endlich mal wieder eine Komödie im besten Sinne des Wortes. Kein lauter Schenkelklopfer, eher eine 'Schmunzelgeschichte' da man das Grinsen nicht wieder wegbekommt, bevor man das Buch aus der Hand legt.
      Dr. Norman Wilfred, ein berühmter Wissenschaftler, reist auf die kleine griechische Insel Skios, um dort bei der Fred-Toppler-Stiftung (die die zivilisierten Werte fördert, was immer die auch sein mögen) einen Vortrag zu halten - der Höhepunkt der jährlichen Hausparty. Gleichzeitig erreicht auch Oliver Fox die Insel, ein charmanter Hochstapler, der nichts anderes macht, als der zu sein, den sich andere wünschen. Dies führt zwangsläufig zu diversen Ärgernissen, wenn sich offenbart, dass er doch nur - Oliver Fox ist. Auf Skios ist er nun Dr. Norman Wilfred und wird freudig von Nikki, der rechten Hand der Vorsitzenden der Fred-Toppler-Stiftung, in Empfang genommen, ebenso wie von allen anderen Gästen. Währenddessen landet der echte Dr. Norman Wilfred in der Pampa, wenngleich in äußerst luxeriöser Umgebung.
      Wie sich nun ein Missverständnis ans andere reiht, Koffer vertauscht werden und wieder zurück vertauscht, Männer in fremden Schlafzimmern landen und Frauen Nächte im Bad verbringen, drei Frauen hinter einem Mann her sind und hinter einem anderen keine einzige, ist einfach ein köstlicher Spaß. Zudem wirft der Autor einen äußerst genauen wie auch ironischen Blick auf die vermutlich(?) typischen Anwesenden einer solchen Veranstaltung - High Society, der es ums Sehen und Gesehenwerden geht, während gleichzeitig legale, halblegale und illegale Geschäfte getätigt werden. Der Einzige, der tatsächlich versteht, worum es bei dem Vortrag gehen soll, wird schlicht mundtot gemacht und eher als Spielverderber betrachtet.
      Eine wirklich schöne Lektüre, die einem einige äußerst vergnügliche Stunden bereitet.
    • 4/5
      Skios is a madcap comedy in which one man's spur-of-the-moment decision to impersonate someone he's never heard of leads to a crazy series of mistaken identities, bedroom surprises, and strange alliances. Oliver Fox, arriving on the Greek island of Skios for a weekend of fun with a girlfriend of five-minutes' acquaintance, sees an attractive young lady at the airport holding up a sign saying "Dr. Norman Wilfred." When she flashes him a hopeful smile, he can't resist the temptation to become Dr. Norman Wilfred. Too late, Fox finds out that he is the guest of honor and keynote speaker at a major international conference, and that he will soon be embroiled in the plans of a shady Greek tycoon and a Russian gangster.The author gives us a little lecture on how one person's actions may set off a completely unpredictable chain of reactions, and even plays around a bit with an alternate ending to make the point, but Skios is mostly just a fun, well-crafted and well-told, diversion. It's an entertaining novel and will no doubt make an equally entertaining movie some day.
    • 3/5
      Tom Sharpe wrote brilliant farces, David lodge writes campus novels, here frayn mixes them up and sets the result on a Greek Island. Very competent and readable , but light holiday matter.
    • 2/5
      This started off as an interesting bit of light farce, so light I had a hard time understanding how it could have been longlisted for the Booker. I remain mystified. I kept waiting for something to be revealed to take it to the next level, but that never happened. Enjoyable, but the lack of either emotional or intellectual payoff was extremely disappointing.
    • 4/5
      A witty, clever farce. Frayn is very skillful in his use of comedy here, and he takes his time building up the characters so that—by the time one is midway through the novel—his continued introductions and complications are just uproariously fantastical and often laugh-out-loud hysterical.

      Frayn's use of dialogue is very smart: I was often reminded of reading a script at times, something that works quite well for the more darkly humorous episodes in Skios as one can almost see this enacted as if on stage. The pacing and the quick-wittedness all factor into the success of this very modern and very British cage aux folles. It was only after finishing the novel that I discovered Frayn wrote the play Noises Off, and the similarity is definitely there.

      Skios is a novel where no one knows who they are; no one knows where they are; and no one knows who or where anyone else is. Some characters fall into multiple categories of confusion, while others emphasize the novel's interest in cultural and linguistic dislocation (e.g., a very funny receptionist; two twin taxi drivers). Where Frayn also excels is in his covert criticism of modern technology: in a world where smart phones exist, even on the island of Skios these smart phones render their users far from smart and, increasingly, become the culprits of mistaken identity, missed opportunities, and failed connections.

      A surprising title to have been long listed for the Booker, especially given the more "high brow" literary titles that usually populate the lists each year. This is certainly not to say that Frayn is not a literary writer; indeed, the comparisons to David Lodge's academic satires (e.g., Changing Places, Small World) are not unfounded, but Frayn has a humor all his own. Could a farce about our modern world win the prize this year? It very well might.
    • 4/5
      Assumed identities, false assumptions, pretensions,an exotic setting, finding strangers in ones' beds, cads, bounders and clever maidens add up to a rollicking farce. Shakespeares' comedies with air travel, cell phones and modern mores.
    • 4/5
      I put this book on hold at the library because it was on the 2012 Booker Prize longlist. It's a mildly entertaining farce set on a Greek isle, involving switched identities, missed connections, mobile phones gone dead, and silly people encountering improbable coincidences. Did I say improbable? It's a farce. I speak in redundancies. I did chuckle out loud a few times, especially in the first half. This novel is not about characters or setting (although the warm sunny environment held appeal); it's about human absurdities and the capriciousness of unfolding events. The novel's ending took a vaguely postmodern shift in narrative perspective that brought home the themes of subjective reality and determinism. There is NO way a reader will predict the ending and this brings the narrator/author into your living room -- suddenly he is a palpable presence and you are reminded that he, and he alone, determines the series of events in the novel. So there.
    • 2/5
      About a quarter of the way through Skios I began to wonder whether the Booker prize judges had enjoyed a few too many glasses of ouzo when they decided to include Michael Frayn's latest novel in the 2012 longlist. How else to account for their choice of a comic novel about a set of characters caught up in a world that spirals into chaos.It's actually in the genre of a theatrical farce but instead of the revolving doors and beds that you get with the likes of a Feydeau farce, in Skios we have red leather suitcases that get muddled up and then keep reappearing but in the wrong places, girlfriends who get mistaken for cleaning ladies, and phone calls/text messages that keep going astray.Skios is set on a Greek island where the great and the wealthy are gathered for the annual retreat of the Toppler Foundation, agog to hear this years guest lecturer Dr Norman Wilfred give his key note address on "Innovation and Governance: the Promise of Scientometrics". It's a lecture he has touted around the world and delivered many times. But arriving at Skios airport, he gets distracted at the baggage carousel, discovers his suitcase has been taken by someone else and instead of being taken by taxi to be feted in the Toppler foundation guest lodge, he finds himself in a villa surrounded by little more than goats. Meanwhile, his luggage and his identity is taken by Oliver Fox, another passenger on the same plane. Although significantly younger than Dr Wilfred, Oliver manages to charm all the Toppler guests into believing he really is the esteemed expert on Scientometrics. Meanwhile, up at the villa surrounded by goats, waits the girl he is supposed to be meeting for a romantic weekend.It's the kind of story line that worked well for Frayn in the 1980s with Noises Off, his stage play about a theatrical group rehearsing and then performing a sex-comedy. He used the same approach in his screenplay for the film Clockwork starring John Cleese as a hapless headmaster beset by a litany of accidents on his way to a headmasters' conference.Farce is harder to execute successfully on the page, than on the stage or in film. In Skios, Frayn shows why he is a master of this genre (which presumably is why he ended on the long list). The action is frenetic with a narrative focus that constantly switches from one set of characters and locations to another until it reaches an explosive ending.Masterful? Yes in terms of handling a complicated plot line. Enjoyable? Marginally so - you could read this on a sun lounger with eyes half closed and enjoy the odd chuckle or too. But that's about it. The problem for me was that the characters seldom rose above the level of painting-by-numbers figures - the plot device too often turned on that well-worn device of miscommunication between foreigners who can't speak each others language. It's difficult to care about what happens to any of these people.Skios does have its moments of acutely observed behaviour and attitudes. The world of the academic lecture circuit is an easy target for comedy and ridicule (think David Lodge's Small World). Frayn's satire is evenly balanced between the academics and their audiences: Norman lectures to "the Something Centre. Or the Something Institute. The Something Something. The Something Something for the Something of Something." to audiences who "had already had lectures on "the Crisis in this and the Challenge of that. They had an Enigma of, a Whither? and a Why?, three Prospects for and two Reconsiderations of."Such moments get lost however amidst the frantic rushing about that farce requires. Equally, there seems to be a theme about identity in which Frayn asks us to consider how we really know who we are - if our name and everything we supposedly represent can so easily be taken by another person, then what is left? But again, the comedy takes over and this question is never really explored.Overall, this is a book that is well short of Frayn at his best. The kind of novel that is instantly forgettable once finished.
    • 4/5
      Dr Norman Wilfred, the world-renowned expert on the management of scientific research flies to the Greek island of Skios to deliver the annual Fred Toppler lecture. On the same plane is Oliver Fox, notorious in his own circles for the outrageous and unexpected things that he does on a regular basis and from which he escapes the worst consequences by using his good-looks and charm. Having been thrown out by Anneka, his partner of several months, Oliver is escaping to Skios to spend a week with Georgie, a casual aquaintance who has fallen for his charm. Picking up the wrong suitcase off the carousel (that belonging to Dr Wilfred), he receives a text from Georgie saying that she has been delayed by 24 hours, and faced with being on his own for the next day, and confronted in Arrivals by the blonde, lightly tanned, and very organised Nikki from the Fred Toppler Institute holding up a sign for Dr Norman Wilfred, Oliver decides that he will be Dr Norman Wilfred for at least as long as it takes for anyone to discover that he isn't. Of course, that leaves the real Dr Wilfred without a suitcase: when he eventually emerges into Arrivals the only person left is the taxi driver sent to meet Oliver and he ends up being taken to Oliver's villa under the mistaken impression that it is the guest quarters of the Fred Toppler foundation. And when Georgie eventually arrives things become more and more complicated.The book carries on in this vein and has all the elements of a tradional farce: mistaken identities; mistaken bedrooms; split-second misses; and people ending up without their clothes (several times). But it's done very well and (almost) believably. And again it was another book that made me laugh several times (this is getting to be a habit) and certainly made me smile a lot. So overall, not a Booker prize winner, in my opinion, and probably not a short-list contender, but a book that it's well worth reading. And the audio version with Martin Jarvis is certainly well worth listening to.
    • 4/5
      Dr. Norman Wilfred has flown to Skios to give a distinguished speech to a group of rich academics at the Toppler Foundation. Due to an unfortunate string of coincidences, he is whisked off to a villa while a con artist, Oliver Fox, takes his place at the Toppler gathering. At first blush, this may seem like to be only a farcical comedy of errors. Fun is poked at the distinguished empty-headedness of academia, at silly assumptions people make when they don't have all the information (which, of course, they never do), and at the openness of people to accept whatever is said--as long as it is said by a charismatic person. However, I can see why this book was chosen for the Booker longlist--upon a more careful reading this book has a much deeper undercurrent. It asks questions about identity and about chance Eureka! moments. I found the ease with with Oliver Fox moved into Norman Wilfred's life almost believable because that IS how academia works sometimes. Sometimes, it IS more about how charming you are than about what's actually coming out of your mouth. Sometimes it IS more about your name and about who people think you are than about who you ACTUALLY are. I understand that this book isn't for everybody...but I'm a person who doesn't generally read farcical novels, and I enjoyed this one immensely.
    • 4/5
      A frothy entertainment, a farce of shuffled suitcases and mistaken identity which works through all the permutations right to the final dénouement, when it suddenly loses patience with itself and its conventions. Good fun.
    • 4/5
      Skios is funny and very well-written. Like the rest of Frayn's work, every sentence and every word feels deliberately and precisely chosen for effect. This book immediately reminded me, however, of a lesser version of David Lodge's academic comedies. Lodge's books are much funnier and feel more natural, less forced than Skios. I suppose Skios feels a bit too self-aware, a little too wink-wink.
    • 2/5
      Well I finally finished this. I had to make myself, really. It started strong and sort of funny, then it became more and more disjointed and not funny. The farce and irony became really forced. I didn't care about the situation or any of the people in it. Too bad though because the guy can write. Like the characterization of a large, classical Greek statue of Athena coming a smeller - "Gradually she leaned a little less slowly, until she passed the point of no return, and measured her length on the ground. She managed it with reasonable dignity, like a duchess overcome by drink..." And "the scribbling of the cicadas." Nice phrases, I just didn't connect with the story at all.
    • 3/5
      I have several friends who consider Michael Frayn's [Noises Off!] the finest farce of our time and the funniest play they've ever seen. I'm less of an enthusiast, frankly but that's not entirely Mr. Frayn's fault. Farce is damned difficult to pull off, perhaps the most technically challenging thing you can do in theatre. If all the actors are not absolute perfection, if the director is not up to the job, if the design team has one weak link, it simply won't work. Because so many people love it, Noises Off gets done a lot in regional and community theaters. I've seen at least three productions of it over the years and I'm probably blanking on the others just because they've all been dissatisfying in one way or another. It's rather like listening to an inexpert performance of a particularly difficult piece of classical music - it's hard to hear the beauty if the player is perpetually hitting wrong notes or has no feel for the piece. So, in a way, I don't feel like I've ever seen a production of Noises Off that lived up to Mr. Frayn's intentions. (Just as I've never seen a wholly successful production of [A Midsummer Night's Dream], but that's another story.)Michael Frayn's newest novel, Skios, is a valiant attempt to make a novel of the conventions of farce - mistaken identity, trysts that never quite work out, the proud and the pompous brought low - all without the benefit of slamming doors. (Though there is one door that takes a considerable beating. It's a bathroom door, naturally.) If farce is a Matterhorn to climb on the stage, it's an Everest on the page. Timing, that most critical element in any stage production, is almost entirely at the whim of the individual reader. Skios almost needs to be read in a single session, or perhaps two with an intermission, to maintain a sufficient pace. I read it over several days, as I suspect many readers would or will do and that made the climb even steeper. Mr. Frayn asks a considerable suspension of disbelief in his central case of mistaken identity. It's hard to maintain that suspension when you're not immersed in the novel and, without it, the whole thing falls apart. I also find I need to like at least someone in a farce and I found none of the characters particularly endearing. Did I laugh out loud? Yup, but not that loud and not that often. I really loved Frayn's [Spies] and found much to admire in [Headlong]. If this one falls short of the mark it's not for lack of ambition.
    • 2/5
      Oliver Fox is one of those feckless young men who makes his way through life responding to the situation as it appears. He lets things shape themselves before and around him, responds with charm, and stays with it until it falls apart or the next situation begins to shape up.He has been kicked out by his sugar momma Annuka once again. But he's also connected with lovely young thing Georgia, exchanged text messages and is flying to a lovely Greek island so they can spend a few nights together away from her boyfriend. At the same time, super-competent Nikki looks over the last-minute arrangements for the annual gathering hosted by the Fred Toppler Foundation. It primarily exists as a way for the former exotic dancer, the widowed Mrs. Fred Toppler, to pay homage to the source of her wealth with a world-class meeeting of minds from finance, academics, government and the like. The speaker every year is dull as dishwater, so Nikki has found the perfect antidote -- Dr. Norman Wilfred. He travels the world giving talks about how smart he is. As long as he keeps his speech nearby, he can weather any discomfort. Until now.Fox takes Wilfred's place at the airport when Nikki waits to meet the speaker she hasn't seen before; she's only talked to his PA for weeks. Then Georgie arrives a day early. People keep mistaking Fox and Wilfred for each other in true screwball comedy situations. Frayn is terrific at making these outlandish events seem semi-plausible. Along the way, he throws in a few light zingers about the nature of foundations, the speakers who make their reputations at them and how similar parlor tricks can look like deep thoughts. Or is that last one the other way round?Without revealing the story's climax, Frayn sets up a meringue-light story, but readers may feel burned at the end. Readers who enjoy complete shifts in story and tone may thrill to the Over the Top action but it is a huge change to overcome. Until then, however, the confection is delightful because when on top of his game, Frayn is adept at making skewing commentary.
    • 3/5
      Dr. Norman Wilfred, world famous authority on the scientific organization of science, arrives on the private Greek island of Skios to give a lecture at a foundation dedicated to delivering high-minded ideas to a gaggle of wealthy, social climbing, elderly guests. Thus begins a series of accidents, misadventures, and mistaken identities that leave Wilfred stripped of his identity and questioning everything. Michael Frayn is a playwright ("Noises Off") and does a wonderful job of creating visual descriptions that jump from character to character building error on error. But over-all the story is a little thin. Misunderstandings that work well on stage or screen don't work as well in the slower medium of print. This is a light, enjoyable read but moved a little too slowly for me.
    • 3/5
      An entertaining farce on a fictional Greek isle. The author cleverly stages the mistaken identity gambit with quirky characters, but in the end, too many loose ends are left untied.
    • 3/5
      Dr. Norman Wilfred, an expert in something called “the scientific organization of science”, is traveling from London to the Greek island of Skios to present a keynote address at the Fred Toppler Foundation. Oliver Fox, a charming but shiftless young man, is also traveling to Skios with the twin goals of escaping his irate girlfriend and spending a week with a beautiful woman who he has spent all of five minutes talking to in a bar and who is also trying to deceive her current boyfriend. When Nikki Hook, the personal assistant to the head of the Foundation and the best friend of Fox’s prospective companion, goes to the airport to pick up Wilfred, she somehow ends up taking Fox instead, who then decides to assume Wilfred’s identity and give the lecture. Meanwhile, Wilfred ends up at the rented villa with both Fox’s new fling and his old girlfriend, who has herself come from London to exact revenge on Fox. Ultimately, all parties converge at the Foundation on the evening of the keynote speech, aided by Stavros and Spiros, two local cabdrivers who make frequent and timely appearances throughout the story.Hopefully, this synopsis makes it clear that ‘Skios’ is a farce involving mistaken identities, hidden motives, and social climbing. (Indeed, the dust jacket of the book leaves nothing to chance in that regard, calling the tale a “spiraling farce” written by the “great master of farce”.) The problem is that, while in no way unpleasant, there was really nothing of substance to hold the reader’s attention throughout the book. In fact, I think the real problem is that a full-length novel is not really the best format for delivering material of this sort. Of course, Frayn is also a renowned playwright (‘Copenhagen’, ‘Noises Off’) and it seems to me that the farcical nature of this tale—with its many implausible events and unlikely coincidences—is much better suited to the theater, where over a briskly paced, two-hour period the audience would not be given much of a chance to dwell on the implications of what they were seeing. In a book read over a few days, however, it is impossible not to think of questions (e.g., Why didn’t Nikki simply look at Oliver’s passport when she had it in her possession?, Why didn’t any guests at the Foundation look up Wilfred’s credentials on the internet and realize that Fox was not their man?) that the author would prefer be left unasked.Unfortunately, then, ‘Skios’ is not a book I can recommend without considerable hesitation. The story is certainly entertaining in parts and the author has done a nice job crafting the plot so that there are no apparent inconsistencies in the confusions and myriad near-misses that occur in virtually every chapter. Still, the characters are little more than cartoons with motives so thinly veiled and predictable that their only apparent purpose is to move the tale forward at a mad-cap pace. Further, I found the ending to be a huge disappointment, which is really saying something for a novel in which nothing of consequence happens in the first place. So, this book could be a suitable addition to someone's “To Be Read at the Beach While Sipping a Frosty, Fermented Beverage” list, but it is hard to imagine that it will have a much wider appeal than that.
    • 3/5
      Set on a Greek island where a sort of holiday/self imptrovement centre has been set up for rich people. In reality it is a front organisation, being used by its owners, international gangsters, for money laundering and also for plunder of ancient treasures (all this is completely unknown to the management).The plot centres around an unintentional switch of identity between an internationally renowned speaker and a beautiful but feckless but highly plausible young man. The speaker finds himself with someone else's identity and staying in the wrong place on the island, with the new "girl friend" of the young man. The latter takes the part of the speaker at the Centre, with great success.For me, the novel is about the flimsyness of perceptions of reality, questions of identity and role, gullibliity and human foolishness.It was entertaining, but often too silly, too contrived, shallow at times and with a weak ending.