The Tin Men by Michael Frayn – #ABookADayInMay Day 21

I’ve read a couple of books by Michael Frayn from later in his career, but it’s quite a departure to read his debut novel – The Tin Men (1965). It is a raucous satire of – well, of quite a few things. And it is prescient in quite an astonishing way about one thing in particular.

We are at the William Morris Institute of Automation Research – chosen by Frayn because of the irony of being named after the artist William Morris, I assume, given his abhorrence of mass-production. The William Morris who made cars would presumably approve. Everything that is being achieved by the institute is a ludicrous extension of normal office practices, and Frayn writes in highly ironic terms about it all:

The whole of the William Morris Institute of Automation Research rang with the bongling and goingling of steel scaffolding poles being thrown down from a great height. The new Ethics Wing was almost finished. It was not before time. The noise and other inconveniences caused by the building of it had considerably reduced the amount of automation the Institute had researched into during the past two years. Experts had calculated that if the revolutionary new computer programmes being designed at the Institute had gone ahead without interruption, they should have put some two million professional men out of work over the course of the next ten years. Now there was a risk that some of these two million would still find themselves in work, or at any rate only partly out of work. But then, said the optimists, for progress to be made someone always had to suffer.

The various figures in charge of departments are a little interchangeable – or, at least, they are all eccentric and incompetent, though their eccentricities and incompetences differ a little in kind. There’s silent, almost immobile Chiddingfold, in charge of everything. There’s Riddle, the sole woman, cigarette always dangling from her lips and given to unexpected displays at company dos. There’s Hugh Rowe, using office hours to write a novel – but deciding it’s easiest to start by writing the fawning jacket copy or glowing reviews. It’s a joke that should get old, but someone remains amusing – even when we get to examples of his prose, which are clearly satirising something and ended up being maybe too good for satire.

My favourite example of the automation is run by Macintosh, doing research into automating morality – by creating Samaritan (and later Samaritan II and Samaritan III) which are programmed to sacrifice themselves in the event of a shipwreck, so long as they can identify that the other objects involved are humans. It’s an example of the humour in The Tin Men – which I found witty rather than laugh-out-loud, and which could be wearing if it weren’t for a certain variety in its applications. I kept being reminded of David Lodge’s Nice Work (though thankfully without Lodge’s fixed belief that writing about going to the toilet is hilarious) – and I thought it was a similar idea done much better and much less annoyingly. Of course, Nice Work came out a couple of decades later, so Lodge might well have been influenced by Frayn.

The humour does feel very of its time – and very of a certain milieu. Perhaps in the 1960s it was a daring, new humour. It now very much feels like the voice of older, middle-class men who can’t punch up, because there is no ‘up’, and so just punch around. We are expected to recognise these worlds, not as an outsider but as people mere steps away from this level of absurdity. I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy the tone, particularly after falling foul with Lodge, but I ended up rather liking it. Somehow it feels more dated than humour from decades earlier, but you can see how it could have been very fresh in the 1960s.

And what is the most prescient thing? Another worker, Goldwasser, is working on the automation of newspapers – and it sounds extraordinarily like AI:

The soporific quiet which filled Goldwasser’s laboratory in the Newspaper Department was disturbed only by the soft rustle of tired newsprint. Assistants bent over the component parts of the Department’s united experiment, the demonstration that in theory a digital computer could be programmed to produce a perfectly satisfactory daily newspaper with all the variety and news sense of the old hand-made article. With silent, infinite tedium, they worked their way through stacks of newspaper cuttings, identifying the pattern of stories, and analysing the stories into standard variables and invariables. At other benches other assistants copied the variables and invariables down on to cards, and sorted the cards into filing cabinets, coded so that in theory a computer could pick its way from card to card in logical order and assemble a news item from them.

Frayn’s vision is still tethered to the concrete, piecing through physical cards to form a newspaper-article-by-prediction, but it is still astonishingly similar to what generative AI is doing now. Musings about whether the automation machines can take over the ‘work’ of prayer are clearly satire, but still incredibly close to current conversations about the ways in which AI might remove spiritual or soulful elements of creativity.

Oh, and I’ve forgotten to say that this isn’t simply a string of funny ideas and people – though the funny ideas are probably the strong point of The Tin Men. There is also an ongoing plotline about the Queen being on her way to open the new wing. It gives some momentum to a novel that could otherwise feel a bit scattergun.

The Tin Men has very little in common – stylistically or thematically – with the later Frayn books I’ve read, and I’m glad I read it. As well as being a fun, silly, eerily farsighted novel, it helps fill in a part of literary history that I’m less aware of and which seems less ripe for rediscovery than others.