Maybe it won't be without effect on the Cold War itself that the entertainment media men have gone over in a big way to spoofing it. Michael Frayn stands rather apart, because he doesn't invent absurdities so much as respond to real ambiguities in the situation. The Russian Interpreter is a spy story about cross-purposes on both sides. His earnest hero Proctor-Gould—an Englishman so convinced by himself he's worth setting beside Mr Powell's Widmerpool—is engaged in Moscow on a mission in which good will shades into espionage. Russian motives are no less mixed; the counter-spy uses his network to bring in forbidden Western books, the girl professor of dialectical materialism turns into a nutty heroine of hotel-bedroom farce. Working for one's country is hardly distinct from working against it, or public duty from private enterprise.

Mr Frayn is as clever with these moot points as a one-man Ilf and Petrov; and since their day there haven't been many other novels about Russia so nicely poised between satire and sympathy. I only wonder if it isn't a bit too gentle, a bit droll merely. He deals with comparatively minor mishaps of the Cold War that are nobody's fault. There's hardly a hint that anyone on either side could behave really badly.