"A formidably learned, unfortunately ponderous comic romp from the British playwright (whose Noises Off is a contemporary classic) and novelist (Now You Know, 1993, etc.)."

Headlong is built on this kind of premise, a dizzying vision or speculation which takes over the whole modest world of the central character. He is Martin Clay, a philosophy lecturer on sabbatical, diligently avoiding work on the book he is supposed to be writing on nominalism, and he is convinced that his disorderly neighbour in the country has, but doesn’t know he has, a lost Bruegel among the mountains of family junk in his rotting ancestral pile. The trick is to remove the painting from its owner without letting him know what he’s got, and this is how Martin thinks he will do it. It’s a piece of accelerated delusion. Groucho would have been proud of him.

"Frayn, a highly successful playwright (Noises Off) as well as a novelist of note (A Landing on the Sun; Now You Know), is an odd combination of skilled farceur and scholar, and these strands in his work seem somewhat at odds in this new novel, his first in six years."

Martin's scholarly detective work is the heart of the story, putting it in a genre that includes A. S. Byatt's ''Possession,'' Carol Shields's ''Swann'' and Tom Stoppard's ''Arcadia.'' In the course of Martin's researches, we learn a great deal about Bruegel and the Netherlands of the 16th century -- political struggle, Spanish imperialism, the Inquisition. Frayn presents many intriguing theories of Bruegel's relationship to his time: did he simply ignore it -- art as escapism? Did he propagandize? Did he conspire with the nationalists? Did he collaborate with their oppressors? Or was he, as Martin briefly considers, ''a hired hack of the Counter-Reformation?'' That this research is so exciting is Frayn's great triumph. He's made a funny, fast-moving book out of a man reading other books.

This intersection of the art market, the class system, and what might be termed the English or British character furnishes an ideal locus for Michael Frayn. In his essays and in his plays and screenplays (Noises Off and Clockwise being notable here) he has raised an edifice of gentle but by no means innocuous satire of his fellow countrymen... The great secret about the English rural idyll – an idyll most harshly dissipated in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs – is that the bucolic scene is very often one of cruelty, surliness, and resentment, rife with nbreeding and inefficiency, and populated quite largely by people who would, had they only the talent or the resources, do anything to sell up and move to the city. (Without elaboration, Martin alludes to ‘the lake that collects in the dip by the wood where we found the dead tramp’.) We are, in any case, very swiftly presented with a truly rebarbative example of the squire at his worst.