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I loved Freya, both the book & the character. The novel is set in a time & place that are my favourites for a historical, England some 60 years back. The late 1940s & early 50s are within my lifetime but just over the horizon. I personally can verify the accuracy only of the last section, which is set in London in 1962, my summer living in the Kangaroo Valley near Earls Court. The book begins in 1945, two girls meet on VE Day & celebrate together & go on to become besties at Oxford. Freya, the daughter of a painter, is rusticated for missing Mods to cover the Nuremberg Trials and goes on to become a journalist in London. Her friend Nancy takes a First and aspires to become a successful novelist whilst working in a publisher’s office. The two young women share frigid digs in Great James Street in Bloomsbury. In the early �50s Freya is fed up with the frustrations of the male-dominated world of Fleet Street & our scene shifts to Italy where Freya & Nancy go for a much needed holiday. It ends with estrangement & Nancy returning to England to marry Robert, a man Freya detests & Freya spending the next 7 years in Rome as an international correspondent. In the final section, it is now 1962. Robert has become a rising politician & Freya returns to Fleet Street once more to renew her relationship with Nancy whilst investigating the mysterious death of the latest supermodel.

Contemporary readers will find attitudes towards homosexuality, abortion, & pay equity for women utterly antediluvian. Reading Freya so often reminded me of how I have seen in my lifetime popular beliefs shift 180 degrees - in the case of gays from jailing them to marrying them. I was fascinated by the details of how a GP went about arranging an abortion anonymously. But some things seemed a bit contrived. A government official’s in a sensitive position being blackmailed might have been handled quite differently. An experienced officer could have gone to the police, & may have ended up in criminal court as a witness under the name of “Mr X� rather than a defendant. Or he could have gone to his superior & confessed all, in which case he could either have been quietly retired from the service & found himself teaching in a minor public school or sent to the Russians as a double agent. Or he could just go straight to the Russians to spy for them, in which case in a few years he’d have run the British Secret Service, so deeply had it been penetrated by the Soviets. Most likely too, at least one of Freya’s editors would have defended pay inequity be asserting that male reporters - unlike a single woman - had to support a household.

Some of the characters are based on real life - Jessica Vaux clearly on Rebecca West & Nate Fane was an absolute dead-ringer for Kenneth Tynan, right down to Magdalen College & a penchant for spanking. (No, Freya’s lover Joss wouldn’t have been incensed when he found out the state of her bottom - he’d have wanted to join the naughty fun!) I was perplexed by the photo on the dust jacket, an appealing shot of the young chanteuse Françoise Hardy (who for me will always be the girlfriend of a racing driver in the film Grand Prix.) It fits none of the characters in either setting or appearance, tho� it might represent the kind of informal street-shot the novel’s sleazy lowlife photog specialises in. That anomaly reveals the principal flaw in this novel, which prevents its reaching the high artistic level of Donna Tartt’s Secret History or Alice Adams’s Invincible Summer, the shallow draught of the characters. I loved that Freya was a wartime plotting-officer in the Wrens, but I never quite believed her as a character. She seemed more a collection of attitudes selected to make her sympathetic to readers today, rather than a real Englishwoman born in the mid-1920s. But Anthony Quinn’s samples of what is supposed to be her journalism were absolutely brilliant: a marvellous pastiche of the bright “switched-on� (OMG, my 1960s vocabulary is recurring!) style. I especially loved her undergraduate Cherwell article on Nate Fane. If you compare her pieces with what appears in the Feature section of contemporary “serious� British newspapers, you’ll see that prose was so much better written then. (Maybe because the authors had read real subjects @ university.) It was also hard to believe in Nancy as a novelist. (Chronologically she’d have been right for Iris Murdoch.) But that’s always a problem with writers as characters. We cannot read their novels, which makes a difference in this book because Freya takes offence @ Nancy’s depiction of a character she identified with herself. But how do we know if Freya’s just being paranoid? The business with Nancy’s diary also seemed contrived only for the convenience of the plot.

A few small details seemed a little off. A Morgan would not have been a very costly posh motor car in the earlier 1960s - tho� it would have been a lot of fresh air fun @ the time: 0-60 just under 10 seconds & top speed of 105. I suspect Robert would have said “racialist� not “racist� in 1962 & that “mad� meaning “angry� would be then an Americanism. But tho� not quite on the level of Proust or Powell, Freya is a stunning recreation of its time. I may, or may not, continue with the sequel Eureka (by 1968 Nat Fane’s original had over-stayed his fame too), but I cannot recommend Freya enough - both the persona & the novel - as an introduction to postwar English society.