Huge, personal costs to others result from their meddling and still puzzle Stephen fifty years later. As he tries to retrieve memories, make necessary connections between events, and put his personal demons to rest, he is a sympathetic figure, and the reader both understands his curiosity as a child-spy and observes with ironic detachment and adult judgment the unfolding disasters he provokes.

Frayn is in full control of his material here, recreating the rather matter-of-fact atmosphere of a suburban London neighborhood during the war--the errant bombing of a neighborhood house and killing of an old woman, the blackouts and alarms, the separated families, the rigid social distinctions, and the indifference toward those of lower class. His depiction of the child's motivation is flawless, the adult Stephen's confusion is plausible, and the dramatic ironies for the reader continue to the end.

Many readers have complained about the ending, and I confess that I, too, was startled, at first, by the last twenty pages. As I started thinking about why Frayn would choose this ending, however, I began to think that perhaps, with all the secrets and spying that take place in the novel, he wanted one final irony--to show that the reader, too, is a kind of spy, a voyeur observing what takes place in the novel and jumping to false conclusions based on partial knowledge, no better than the characters. If that's the case, he certainly gets the last laugh. Mary Whipple