Michael Frayn salutes his friends in a funny, ingenious memoir

The thinking man’s Alan Bennett? A less clever-dick Tom Stoppard? Ayckbourn without quite so many laughs? Intelligent without insisting on his intelligence, witty without too much trying-to-please, ingenious yet sedulous, Michael Frayn is the ideal of the old-fashioned English man of letters: the dramatist as belles-lettrist.

Yet he’s also rather difficult to place. Wildly successful over a career spanning more than 50 years and encompassing not only plays but novels, non-fiction, journalism, adaptations, translations and writing for film, he’s known equally for his early farces, including Noises Off (1982), and for his super-serious later work, such as Copenhagen (1998), about the relationship between the German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his Danish counterpart Niels Bohr.

In Among Others, Frayn now turns his hand to memoir. He has already written about his family in My Father’s Fortune (2010); there have been various collections of personal essays; and, of course, the novels and plays represent an exploration of his many intellectual interests, enquiries into the nature of chaos and order, staged for the purposes of entertainment. So, a lot of us probably feel like we know Michael Frayn, or wish we did: he is the sort of writer who feels like a friend.

Among Others is about his actual friends, each chapter given over to a particular person and relationship. There is a wonderful chapter about Eric Korn, for example, “a shameless cleverstick”, canny book-dealer, stalwart of Radio 4’s Round Britain Quiz, and the man who introduced Frayn to (he reckons) cybernetics, comparative philology, Ronsard, Rabelais, John Dos Passos, Budd Schulberg and much else besides. “What did I do for him in return?” asks Frayn. “Nothing, really.”

There are dozens of others about whom Frayn writes with tremendous care and understanding: friends, lovers, acquaintances, and some people “simply because the memory of them amused me”. Thus, there is Dame Elizabeth Hill, professor of Slavonic studies and director of the Joint Services School for Linguists, who taught Frayn Russian (and whose first marriage came at the age of 84 to a Serbian baron, whom she divorced aged 95). There is the journalist Neal Ascherson, dashing and brave; the theatre director and accomplished body-surfer Michael Blakemore; Bamber Gascoigne, perhaps Frayn’s dearest friend, dashing Old Etonian and host of University Challenge; angry playwright Peter Nichols, author of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg; and Sarah Haffner the painter, an early love, with whom Frayn enjoyed a “slightly wary friendship” that lasted for 30 years, though “always coloured by the memory of what it once was, and that always requires a certain amount of mutual tact”.

There is much tact displayed throughout, not least in an extraordinary chapter about Frayn’s brilliant childhood friend David, who ended up working as a glamour photographer and who eventually committed suicide, the victim of an appalling bully of a father who, Frayn writes, had managed to turn “my friend’s advantages in life to dust, devalued his skills and imagination, undermined his self-confidence and poisoned his pleasure in the world” – perhaps the only words of bitterness and recrimination in the whole book.

With Frayn now approaching 90, Among Others feels like a summing-up and is also a fine example of late style, that last period in life in which writers and artists occasionally achieve a kind of clear-eyed serenity. The final chapter of the book explores Frayn’s relationship with his own body, in decline and decay, with characteristic amusement and insight. As he writes of Eric Korn, who ended his life suffering from dementia in a care-home: “From all that teeming main of knowledge, all that quickness, all that invention, all that fun, all that fame, all that sheer cleverness – not a trace was left. Nothing except a few stranded specimens like these, collected and preserved in the memories of his surviving friends.” A forget-me-not composed as a series of forget-me-nots: this is Frayn’s final ingenious piece of work.

Among Others is published by Faber at £25. To order your copy for £19.99 call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books