A Landing on the Sun, Michael Frayn's new novel, starts and ends with a pair of hands. Brian Jessel, the narrator, describes the actions and qualities of the hands, and his description is impersonal and efficient. We learn subsequently that the hands belong to Jessel, but it seems that he never understands this fact, nor its reflection on himself: the banality of his life is so great that he doesn't seem to notice that he is alive.

Jassel's predicament makes A Landing on the Sun both humorous and sad, and thus the novel will neither surprise nor disappoint readers familiar with Frayn's most recent work, The Trick of It. Like most of his plays, novels, and screenplays, A Lnading on the Sun is a comic work of light, unassuming wit, tempered with the author's usual quiet sense of the prosaic tragedy of life. Frayn's greatest strength rests in his talent at reconciling humor and sadness, and he achieves this rapprochement in the book with gentle facility.

The narration of the novel is an acutely personal one. It belongs to Brian Jessel, a young British citizen who works in the Cabinet Office and hides behind his beard in order to observe life without taking part in it.

The narrative style Frayn employs occasionally takes the form of a kind of muted stream of consciousness, and when it does, it tends to sound like a bored, dull Joyce. However, the consciousness of a proper English civil servant yields more amusement than might be expected, sometimes by virtue of his very perspective.

A Landing on the Sun

By Michael Frayn

Viking Penguin

$21.00

The book's primary action revolves around Jessel's latest assignment--he investigates the mysterious death of a man named Stephen Summerchild, who once held Jessel's own position. Rumors of espionage and exposed state secrets surround Summerchild's death and have aroused the interest of the press; the government tries to quiet them by assigning Jessel to investigate Summerchild's life and work.

The press misreads Summerchild's lifestyle completely; he is at once more simple and more involved than they imagine. Jessel discovers, through transcripts and cassette tapes, that Summerchild worked on an inquiry of his own: along with philosophy professor Elizabeth Serafin, Summerchild searched for the nature of happiness.

Jessel lives vicariously what he believes life had been like for Summerchild and Serafin, based on the skeletal framework he constructs of transcripts, tapes, memos and photographs. As they had sought happiness, so does he.

His distance from his own life increases as the story of Summerchild and Serafin (and Jessel) reaches its crescendo, and the characters and plot of his own story become more and more alien.

The reader finishes A Landing on the Sun feeling almost sucker-punched, albeit gently. The story allows Jessel to see their achievement of happiness, but the reader ultimately realizes the impossibility of happiness in Jessel's own life. The light touch of Frayn's clever humor makes Jessel's tragedy more poignant.

Frayn gives a whimsical edge to Jessel's serious outlook--and succeeds winningly at a type of comedy that seems particular to the British. But what is important and moving in A Landing on the Sun, and what most likely won it Britain's most valuable fiction prize, the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, is its profound sense of prosaic tragedy. The laughing stops abruptly at the end of A Landing on the Sun, and in this breathless transition Michael Frayn succeeds magnificently.