Customer Reviews

The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
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This is a marvellous entertainment - I'm not sure whether I should correctly describe it as either a memoir or novelette - which explores the nature of reality. It's not really a sequel to Michael Frayn's splendid play "Copenhagen", but does delve into some of the same terrain as the play. Instead, it is a witty exchange of thoughts and letters sent between Michael Frayn and actor David Burke (He portrayed physicist Niels Bohr during the play's original London production) about a set of manuscripts which allegedly date from the internment of German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his colleagues at Farm Hall immediately after the end of World War II. What follows is a terse, spellbinding mystery which is well told by both writers, replete with ample doses of English humor.

I thought COPENHAGEN was a great play, and I picked up this
book thinking it was background for the play (the bookjacket
gives some hints that that isn't the case, but I didn't bother
to read that. Anyway, it turns out to be less than that, and
also much more. I was sucked into the mystery along with
Michael Frayn, and read it in one sitting (it's short). I
highly recommend it for pure entertainment.

I loved the play Copenhagen - saw it four times, and it re-sparked my interest in physics, which I read about as a hobby. I know, weird, but whatever, I'm a smart chick.

Anyway, this book isn't about the play at all, really, it's about an exchange of letters between the author and one of the actors in the London production of Copenhagen. And it's well-crafted, I think anyone who enjoys a good mystery, and a bit of the backstage goings-on would enjoy the book. It certainly captivated me and both Michael Frayn and David Burke write well and with a good deal of dry British humor.

This delightful book should be required reading for anyone who has seen or read Michael Frayn's play "Copenhagen." The actor David Burke (who starred in the play) and playwright Frayn describe their reactions to a baffling set of German papers that seem to have been written during Werner Heisenberg's stay at a British estate after World War II. Although I am not going to give away the truth as it unfolds in this story (the editorial reviews above do that), I will say that the point of the book is not so much whether the papers were geniune or a hoax as it is the depths to which talented, bright, curious people such as Frayn and Burke will go as they wrestle with fascinating ideas. These two men bring to vivid life the dramas behind the dramas.

I loved this book because I happened to read it within the contexts of Mr. Frayn's other contemporaneous work. Here's what I suggest for an utterly intriguing run of books: read Frayn's Copenhagen, Headlong, The Copenhagen Papers, and Spies in that order. I suppose his most recent book of philosophy The Human Touch would top it off conceptually. But the four works preceding are one multi-faceted puzzle. Loved them all... together!!

A bad hoax and a book that probably shouldn't
have been written.
It does no one proud and is pretty much a waste of time to read.
No one but a famous man could get trash like this published.