Michael Frayn has long been concerned with what one might portentously call the nature of reality and, until now at least, he's always stood squarely opposed to those who've attempted to fob off the rest of us with alluring substitutes. Hence his rather puritanical obsession with pop culture and the mass media, with ignorant pundits, facile critics and, of course, the eternal PROs and admen. The novels, especially The Tin Men, have pushed the attack rather further than the journalistic pieces. Why not, he asks at one point, an eventual world in which computers play all the games, watch and appreciate each other playing the games and discuss the game afterwards on TV, watched by yet more computers? It's all very fanciful, and may seem frivolous to some, but there's a genuine anxiety some-where behind it. What is happening, not just to people's ability to distinguish truth from pretence, but to their very capacity to feel?…

Frayn took his degree in moral sciences; and if anyone doubts that his interests are indeed essentially philosophic, he should closet himself with A Very Private Life, a novel that gnaws at the mind, like some maddening if nonmalevolent virus, and leaves it hot and irritated long afterwards; a subtle, rather difficult book, unusual by any criterion and easily the most original thing he, Frayn, has done.

Marshall McLuhan tells us we're living in a 'global village', and certainly the mass media force shared experience upon us; yet we don't seem markedly nearer achieving any brotherhood of man. Quite the contrary. Isn't it an observed sociological truth that urban, and especially suburban people are increasingly suspicious of and hostile to those outside their own tightly circumscribed group? In other words, is it altogether fanciful to imagine as Frayn does, a world where the privileged have retreated to hermetically sealed compartments into which machines pipe food, air and a hundred varieties of happiness? Indeed, such is the efficiency of the holovision, a TV-telephone more potent than Huxley's 'feelies', that physical contact with others is hardly necessary. You swallow your Libidin and Orgasmin, dial an agreeable girl, coyly remove the dark glasses from your one taboo area, your eyes, and spend a few days enjoying a multi-coloured, three-dimensional wet dream.

And what's so wrong with that? This time, I think, Frayn isn't simply pressing the case for his back-to-nature movement. 'Nature', after all, isn't so easily defined, any more than is 'reality'. His fable is more hesitant, more ambivalent than that. The heroine, futuristically called Uncumber, feels a vague dissatisfaction with the holovision. That sun, the mountains, those aromatic bushes aren't, she knows, the genuine article. So she takes a trip to the outer world, which turns out to be smelly, messy, intermittently brutal, and not very satisfactory in any sense. The man she falls for uses her in a desultory, offhand sort of way, as if he was masturbating. It is all very sad.

So which is to be preferred, life itself or a life or rapt hallucinations? It could be objected that Frayn has unfairly loaded his scales by presenting a peculiarly dispiriting picture of 'reality', or, again, that the choice itself is merely sportive. There's no such thing as holovision and not likely to be. Perhaps not; but that doesn't dispose of the questions Frayn raises…. After all, of what can we be absolutely sure except our private, subjective sensation?…

The subject is pregnant, as Frayn clearly knows. When one says, 'I love you', one means, roughly, I am experiencing a necessarily private complex of sensations which I find peculiarly satisfying and which, by a process of ratiocination, I conclude to be attributable to the sight, smell, sound and touch, indeed my own total sensory experience, of you. But if 'I' could achieve as satisfying a result more easily, 'you' would be redundant, because it is my private sensations, not you or 'love' or any other fuzzily-worded concept, that's the essence of the matter. Other people are necessary only as long as we lack an adequate substitute for them. In short, the material world as one knows it is a means to a private end, no more, and isn't of essential value in itself.

Where and how far Frayn would take this argument I don't know; but his book is very suggestive. It should appeal to anyone who wants to think more about, well, anything from the defects of existentialism to the Ian Brady case. And (no small matter) it's written with that elegant simplicity, that easy precision, of which Michael Frayn is so splendidly capable.