Where are we? Where are we going? What’s in store?

John Fraser’s The Answer considers these questions in four stories:

In ‘The Colours of Air’ many characters live in an apartment, a microcosm - intellectuals from Sartre to de Beauvoir, security experts, emigres and refugees, traditionals from the country, all involved in strategies of survival. In the end, the question becomes to survive, what must be jettisoned, what has irrevocably been lost?

In ‘Peace and War’ - chronicles couples, joining up and spinning off, East Europeans on the margin of a West where music and drink are the context - hiding and burying the dead is a main task - Pavel, the protagonist seems to find permanence in stonework, sculpture, but all wait expectantly for the sound of horses, horsemen and their messages. These characters are on the margin - there seems to be no core, though they are seeking it.

In ‘Interlude’ two displaced intellectuals are being vetted for their status, their security. The theme is ‘space without freedom’ - waiting, with expectancy, but without knowing what comes next.

The answer finally comes in ‘The Answer’. It’s daring, a risk, a leap into the unknown, with probable disastrous results.