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Two of the most commonly studied novels for AQA's Modern Times option — Graham Swift's Waterland (1983) and Michael Frayn's Spies (2002) — are centrally concerned with the relationship between memory, history, and narrative. Both novels ask: can we trust our memories? Can we trust the stories we tell about the past? And what happens when the boundaries between history and fiction dissolve? This lesson takes Spies as its primary focus, because it is the more frequently set text on this option, and reads it alongside Waterland to build the comparative, contextual answer Paper 2 demands.
A standing caution: Spies is an in-copyright modern novel, and the micro-quotations that circulate in study guides are often misremembered. The few phrases quoted below have been checked; everything else is analysed in precise prose without quotation marks. You should do the same — with these texts, an accurate account of how a scene works always beats a doubtful quotation, which fails AO1 and undermines the AO2 it is meant to support.
Paper 2, Texts in Shared Contexts: Option 2B, Modern Times (1945–present). Memory-and-history fiction is where this option's postmodern strand is most concentrated, and the texts are studied in connection, so comparison is built into the assessment. The objectives align as follows:
A useful rule for this lesson: in these novels the narrator is never simply a window onto the past. The narrator is the subject. The strongest answers analyse the act of remembering — its gaps, evasions and reconstructions — rather than treating the recalled events as if they were straightforwardly given.
Both Waterland and Spies belong to a literary mode that the critic Linda Hutcheon, in A Poetics of Postmodernism (1988), called historiographic metafiction — fiction that is simultaneously about history and about the process of writing history. These novels do not simply tell stories set in the past; they interrogate how we construct, narrate, and understand the past. The mode is the literary face of a broader postmodern scepticism that Jean-François Lyotard described as an "incredulity towards metanarratives" (The Postmodern Condition, 1979): a loss of faith in the grand explanatory stories — Progress, Nation, the orderly march of cause and effect — that earlier ages used to make sense of time. Both novels replace the confident grand narrative with something provisional, partial and self-doubting.
| Feature | Detail |
|---|---|
| Self-conscious narration | The narrator draws attention to the act of storytelling — acknowledging gaps, uncertainties, and the temptation to invent |
| Unreliable memory | Memory is shown to be selective, reconstructive, and shaped by present needs rather than a faithful recording |
| History as narrative | History is not a collection of facts but a story told by someone, for a purpose, from a particular perspective |
| The past in the present | The past is never simply "over" — it erupts into the present, shapes it, and is reshaped by it |
Michael Frayn, born in 1933, drew on his own wartime childhood in a south-London suburb for Spies, published in 2002 into a culture saturated with WWII memory — a steady stream of memoir, anniversary commemoration, and fiction returning to the home front as the last generation of those who lived it grew old. The novel belongs to that wave but interrogates it: where popular memory tends to gild the war with nostalgia and moral clarity, Frayn examines how unreliable, partial and self-serving the act of remembering actually is. The Close — the ordinary suburban cul-de-sac of the action — matters contextually because the war here is not the Blitz or the front line but rationing, blackout, absent fathers and a community policing its own respectability. Frayn's quiet point is that the great historical event was lived, by most people and especially by children, as a texture of small domestic mysteries imperfectly understood.
The narrator is an elderly man who, in the novel's present, is triggered into memory by the scent of a particular shrub. He returns — first imaginatively, then literally — to the suburban Close of his wartime childhood and the summer when his domineering friend Keith Hayward made an announcement that detonated their world: "My mother is a German spy" (a verified phrase, the novel's six-word hook). The remainder of the book reconstructs that summer and its consequences.
Frayn's central technical device is a split between two versions of the same self, and getting its mechanics right is essential AO2:
| Voice | Characteristics |
|---|---|
| The elderly narrator (Stefan) | Reflective, uncertain, openly fallible. He frequently refers to his younger self in the third person — "Stephen does this", "Stephen sees that" — a grammatical distancing that enacts the gulf between the rememberer and the remembered child, and quietly admits he can no longer fully inhabit that boy's mind |
| The child (Stephen), present tense | The childhood scenes are narrated in the present tense and largely from inside the boy's limited understanding, so that the past is re-enacted rather than recounted. The reader is placed alongside a child who registers everything and comprehends almost nothing |
The two layers turn on a buried identity. The narrator is German by birth — his family name was Weitzler, anglicised to Wheatley when they left Germany before the war, so that the boy "Stefan" became "Stephen". A correction to the common study-guide account is worth making: it is not simply that "Stefan" was a name "hidden during the war"; the novel's late revelation is that the narrator himself was the secret foreigner all along — the very thing the boys were hunting for in Keith's mother was, unrecognised, embodied in Stephen. The dramatic irony is total and retrospective: the spy-hunt for a concealed German is narrated by a concealed German who did not understand his own identity at the time.
The novel's deepest subject is not the war but the act of remembering it. The elderly narrator repeatedly qualifies and hedges his own account — confessing that he is unsure, that he cannot be certain, that the order of events may be wrong — so that the prose is studded with the grammar of doubt. Frayn's method is to make uncertainty audible: the hesitations are not weaknesses in the telling but the telling's true subject. Memory, the novel argues, is not a recording played back but a reconstruction assembled in the present out of fragments, shaped by emotion, shame and the stories the rememberer has since told himself. The form enacts what historiographic metafiction theorises.
The engine of the plot is the gap between seeing and understanding. The boys observe a series of clues — Keith's mother slipping away on errands, her contact with a dishevelled man hiding near the disused railway, and above all a column of small "x" marks in her diary — and assemble from them the thrilling hypothesis that she is an enemy agent meeting a spymaster, "Mr X". The reader, reading over the boys' shoulders, gradually constructs the adult truth they cannot: the marks track a menstrual cycle, the hidden man is no spy, and Keith's mother is conducting a clandestine, probably adulterous, relationship — caring for a man (likely a deserter or her own missing brother-in-law) whom the war has driven into hiding. Here a firm correction to the legacy account is required: the "x" marks are entries in Keith's mother's diary, not, as some notes claim, symbols that "Keith marks things with" to mean "examined". Their force is precisely that the boys misread a private, female, bodily code as a code of espionage — the novel's central image of comprehension failing. Childhood memory, Frayn shows, preserves the sensory surface with hallucinatory vividness while losing, or never grasping, the meaning beneath.
The friendship is an unequal alliance structured by class. Keith's family is securely middle-class — the detached house, the motor car, the immaculate garden and clipped privet hedge — while Stephen's is shabbier and lower-middle-class, his own home untidy and faintly shameful by comparison. The class difference governs the boys' dynamic completely: Keith commands and Stephen obeys, Keith invents the plot and Stephen executes the dangerous errands. The point worth making for AO3 is that Frayn shows class operating not through explicit rule but through internalised code — the quality of a hedge, the ownership of a car, the neatness of a lawn — which Stephen absorbs as natural law. He never questions Keith's superiority, and the novel links this directly to credulity: a boy who accepts without question that Keith is his better will also accept without question Keith's story about his mother. Deference and gullibility are the same habit of mind.
The whole narrative is set in motion by an involuntary sensory trigger — the smell of privet (which the narrator first encounters under its German name, Liguster). The Proustian parallel is exact: where Proust used the taste of a madeleine to unlock involuntary memory, Frayn uses a hedge-smell that is, in the boy's experience, charged with secrecy and a half-understood sexual excitement. The choice is purposeful. Smell is the most primitive and least controllable of the senses, wired directly to the brain's emotional centres, and the fact that the entire reconstruction is summoned by an odour rather than a deliberate effort of recall underlines the novel's thesis: memory is embodied and ambushing, not intellectual and willed. We do not so much remember the past as get caught by it.
Beneath the detective plot, Spies is a novel of belated guilt. The boys' game has real victims: their surveillance of Keith's mother helps to expose and trap the hidden man she is protecting, and the consequences are adult and irreversible in a way the children never intended or grasped. The elderly narrator returns, in part, because the episode left a residue of complicity he has spent a lifetime not examining — and the form registers this in the very reluctance of the telling, the way the narrative circles the most painful disclosures and approaches them sidelong. The boys' hideout in the privet, a secret den from which they spy unseen, becomes the controlling image of the whole book: a place of concealment from which one watches others' concealments, childhood's innocent game indistinguishable, at the level of action, from the surveillance state the war has normalised. Frayn's quiet irony is that the spy-hunters are themselves the spies, and that the most damaging secret in the novel is not the woman's but the one buried in the watcher who narrates. The reconstruction can recover the events; what it cannot fully do is absolve them, and the novel's honesty lies in refusing the consolation of a tidy confession.
| Technique | Effect |
|---|---|
| Split narration (third-person child, first-person elder) | The grammatical gap between the remembering man and the remembered boy dramatises the unreliability and the loss at the heart of memory |
| Present tense for the past | Re-enacts rather than recounts the childhood, granting it immediacy while paradoxically signalling that it is being reconstructed now, not played back |
| Restricted child focalisation | We are confined to what the boy can perceive, so we share his blindness and supply the adult meaning ourselves — generating sustained dramatic irony |
| Sensory detail | Smell, texture, temperature: memory is rendered as physical sensation, not abstract recall |
| Gradual revelation / detective structure | The reader solves the mystery ahead of the narrator, which converts reading into active investigation and exposes the gap between the boys' fantasy and the adults' reality |
Swift wrote Waterland in the early Thatcher years, a moment when the place of history in the school curriculum was a live political controversy and the prevailing public mood prized enterprise, the present and the future over the study of the past. The novel reads, in part, as a defence of history itself — a sustained argument for why a culture that abandons the past impoverishes itself — voiced, pointedly, by a history teacher whose subject is being cut.
Tom Crick is a history teacher facing forced early retirement as his department is folded into "General Studies". In response, he abandons the syllabus and tells his class the entangled story of his own family and the Fenland in which they lived. The novel braids three timeframes:
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