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Amazon.co.uk Review
As Frayn, Burke and the rest of the cast prepared to transfer the play into the West End, Frayn received a package of yellowing papers from a woman by the name of Celia Rhys-Evans, which to his excitement provided "a completely new source of information about Farm Hall, and they cast an astonishing new light on the story".
Before long Frayn is seduced by Celia's Secret, and becomes increasingly obsessed with unravelling the bizarre collection of papers which Celia discovered under the floorboards of Farm Hall years earlier. As Frayn tries to decipher Celia's package, he feels a sense of being sucked into his own fictions, realising that one of the themes of Copenhagen is "the baffling irreconcilability of so much of the historical evidence". He also realises that his frustration with cracking the papers starts to resemble the behaviour of Martin Clay, the protagonist of Frayn's novel Headlong. However, as the book unfolds it becomes clear that neither Celia nor David Burke are quite what they seem. Celia's Secret is a delightful literary practical joke at Frayn's expense, but some readers may find it a little self-indulgent. --Jerry Brotton --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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One day during the run of Michael Fryan's play Copenhagen, a curious letter arrived from a housewife in Chiswick. She enclosed a few faded pages of barely legible German which she thought might have some relevance to the mystery at the play's heart. They turned out to mark the start of a long and winding trail.
The subject of Copenhagen is the strange visit that the German physicist, Werner Heisenberg, made to his former Danish colleague, Niels Bohr in 1941. The two old friends now found themselves on opposite sides in a world war, and Heisenberg could not explain to Bohr that he was running the Nazis' secret atomic programme. His intentions have intrigued and baffled historians, and the hitherto unpublished German documents which Celia Rhys-Evans now began to send Michael Frayn cast a remarkable new light on certain aspects of the story.
The gradual emergence of these papers was followed with particularly close interest by the actor, David Burke, who was playing Niels Bohr, and who had happened to have a wide experience of documents of this sort. When it was all over David Burke and Michael Frayn sat down together, rather as Bohr and Heisenberg do in the play, to try to unravel the mystery, and, like Bohr and Heisenberg, to confront once again the eternal difficulty of knowing why we do what we do.
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But as the story unfolds, the mystery unravels. To say how would be essentially to reveal this entire little book, so I won't. But suffice it to say that, in a sense, the reader is the "victim" in this mystery; you'll have to decide how you feel about that.
I have to confess though -- I tore through it in two sittings....
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