Review: The Frequency of Us

Keith Stuart, for many years the Guardian’s expert on video games and author of two previous books (A Boy Made of Blocks and Days of Wonder), confirms in his ambitious new novel that he is a writer of exceptional talent, able to focus the reader’s mind on anxiety while subtly edging towards an unexpectedly uplifting conclusion.

In The Frequency of Us the two central figures are as unalike as two denizens of Bath could be. Will Emerson, a pioneer radio engineer in the late 1930s, lives with his wife Elsa Klein, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Vienna.

When their house is bombed by the Nazis in 1942, Will is injured, wakes up in hospital and, on his return home, finds no sign of Elsa or her possessions.

Sixty-five years later, still living in that damaged house and edging towards dementia, Will is in need of care and receives visits from Laura, a young social worker. While trying to carry out a professional job and report back to the authorities about her obstroperous patient, Laura finds her own anxieties amplified by all she learns from Will, and about Will’s beloved Elsa — to whom, it seems, he was never actually married. The very house in which Laura visits Will seems at times to resonate with strangely disturbing sounds and visions.

Gradually, through a succession of first-person chapters narrated by Will or Laura, more and more is revealed about the mysterious past and, in particular, the intriguing figure that was (and possibly still is) “Elsa”. After the Anschluss, Elsa’s father manages to get her a visa to Britain where she settles in Bath. A striking young redhead, Elsa speaks good if accented English to the young men she meets, including Will and his friends, talks about Kurt Weill and Noel Coward, prefers the art of Klee and Kokoschka to English pastoralism — and leaves a note to Will inside a copy of Herbert Read’s Art Now suggesting they meet again.

Stuart keeps us in suspense as we follow the revelations of crotchety old Will and the neurotic determination of young Laura to discover what really happened to Elsa. Who was the young neighbour in Will’s wireless workshop when the bombers approached? Why did Laura’s father become aggressive towards her? Was Elsa a kraut (or a spy) – and how did playing Schubert at a party help to “save” her? What does her aunt Josephine know? And can the demolition of Will’s old house be delayed while its secrets are being unearthed?

Life, Stuart concludes, is like travelling along a radio dial from left to right: you discover stations you love, then move on and lose them. But listen closely and you may catch their ghosts still transmitting...

Daniel Snowman’s most recent book is his memoir, ‘Just Passing Through: Interactions with the World 1938-2021’