My taste in contemporary fiction tends towards authors - Coetzee, Saramago, Barrico, DeLillo, Gustafsson, Murakami, Oshiguro - that master the art of meshing the darkly epic, the philosophically profound and the mildly surrealist into a compelling literary edifice. A few weeks ago I hurriedly picked up a copy of Faulks' Engleby in an airport bookshop. To be honest, I had never heard of Sebastian Faulks but there was something in the introductory paragraph - a mixture of matter-of-factness and grating irony - that made me want to read on ("My name is Mike Engleby, and I'm in my second year at an ancient university. My college was founded in 1662, which means it's viewed here as modern. Its chapel was designed by Hawksmoor, or possibly Wren; its gardens were laid out by someone else whose name is familiar ..."). I was hooked before even the plane had left the tarmac. The fascination endured, and deepened into exhilaration, as the narrative unfolded over its 340 pages and culminated in a spellbinding finale.This book can be convincingly read as a murder mystery, a complex psychological portrait and a dark metaphysical fable. Each of these layers raises the stakes associated to developments at underlying levels. As a portrait it digs deeply into the mental furrows of a character that is desperate to understand the workings of its own convoluted mind. As a fable it subtly sets in scene the archetypal confrontation between the life-confirming forces of light and the nihilistic powers of darkness. The "light vs darkness" metaphor is, perhaps, less appropriate as Engleby is a diabolical, luciferan character. Emotionally detached, superbly gifted as an observer and intellectually ruthless he is able to shed a cold, piercing light on the machinations of evil.The exhilaration from reading this book is due to Sebastian Faulks' ability to match the tonality and rhythm of his prose exactly to the complexity of his lead character and the carefully unfolding, layered plot. Engleby's reflections are cast in a wonderfully precise and luminous prose. It is hard etched, grammatically and lexically precise, but it also convincingly recaptures the informality of working class and student slang. And there are occasional flourishes of great, moving empathy when Engleby ruminates on the object of his veneration ("Jennifer sat back against the wooden settle in a slightly defensive posture; she wore a floral print skirt. I could see her bare legs. She had a sharp patella that gave a fetching inverted-triangle shape to the knee. She was smoking a cigarette and trying not to laugh, but her eyes looked concerned and vulnerable as Robin's low voice went urgently on. She is alive, God damn it, she is alive. She looks so poised, with that womanly concern beginning to override the girlish humour. I will always remember that balanced woman/girl expression in her face. She was twenty-one.")More than anything else it is the quality of this prose that exposes the reader to the complexities and contradictions endemic in diabolical violence. "Engleby" is a marvelous, masterly study and a great contemporary novel.
“In panic, time stops: past, present and future exist as a single overwhelming force. You then, perversely, want time to appear to run forwards because the ‘future’ is the only place you can see an escape from the intolerable overload of feeling. But at such moments time doesn’t move. And if time isn’t running, then all events that we think of as past or future are actually happening simultaneously. That is the really terrifying thing. And you are subsumed. You’re buried, as beneath an avalanche, by the weight of simultaneous events.” These are the words of Mike Engleby, Sebastian Faulks’ socially awkward, darkly comic, overly intellectual, morally ambiguous and immensely unreliable narrator for whom consciousness is nothing short of a disease. Borrowing from Patricia Highsmith, Samuel Beckett and Norman Bates, Faulks’ compelling, psychological character-study begins slowly but builds to an almost unbearable level of suspense. It’s one of the most exciting books I’ve read this year. Initially, the novel is quite restricted in its perspective, centering on the protagonist’s first-person narrative. The product of a poverty-stricken, working-class background—beaten by his father and cruelly tormented by schoolmates—Engleby earns a place for himself at Cambridge during the early 1970s where he lurks on the edges of social intercourse, spending most of his time obsessing over a young woman he first notices in a tea room of the University Library. When this young woman disappears, I found myself both questioning Engleby’s motives and his voice, yet, empathically, I couldn’t help but root for him; Faulks has a way of making the reader feel both complicit and compassionate. As the story moves forward to 2006, and the puzzling truths flower into multiple layers of self-deception, self-loathing, and self-analysis; Faulks delivers an Atonement worthy shift in narrative perspective that elicits a kind of self-reflexive interrogation of readerly desires. Indeed, the novel offers multiple pleasures as it negotiates the fluidity of identity, the mystery of identification, the need for closure and the inconsolable want for happiness. It’s a smart yet sad novel and very much worth the effort.
What do You think about Engleby (2007)?
very interesting story - very disturbing. disturbing because the main character is complicated. you know there is something "off" about him yet you can probably relate to him on some level (unless you had a really "wonder-bread life"). by the end of the book it disturbs you that you were able to relate to him at all (and that such a character could exist - but you know he probably could). i like the twists and the complexity. i also like that it is written in 1st person - you feel like you stumbled across this guy's diary (which you sort of did). i wanted the book to be longer (which is a sign i really enjoyed it).
—Ava
Against all expectations, and rather reluctantly, I thoroughly enjoyed this novel. Unreliable narrators, especially one as pathologically unstable as Mike Engleby, are fun to read. The suspense here isn't about the plot, it's about the reader trying to figure out what to believe and what not to believe. Mike's darkly humorous, sometimes monotonous (in the most literal sense of the word, rather than the emotions it evokes in the reader) voice lays bare the social and political landscape of Thatcher's, then new labour's Britain. Having grown up in these years myself, the detail with which Faulks decorated his narrative we're both convincing and evocative of the time.If you're looking for an intricate plot, don't read this. It's not a novel about story, but rather a richly detailed depiction of a character hopelessly devoid of any guilt or empathy for others. His back story goes some way to explain why he is like he is, but one is still left with the feeling that he was always an accident waiting to happen, which of course it does in the pages of this novel! Any feelings of familiarity with his thought processes should immediately be followed up with a visit to a therapist!
—Chris Tinniswood
Not entirely sure how I feel about this one. It's the story of a disturbed young man, Mike Engleby, as he goes to college. The book is written as a memoir and skips back and forward in time through Engleby's time in public school where he is physically and mentally abused to college where is considered a loner and weird. The story builds towards the disappearance of Jennifer, a college student who Mike has become obsessed with. It's always in your mind that Mike has something to do with whatever happened to Jennifer. But as time goes on and Mike builds a successful career for himself you begin to think that maybe he was just an awkward guy who has finally become more comfortable in his own skin. Faulks paints the picture of a troubled man but plays it so close to the wire that you never know is he just odd or really capable of doing terrible things. An unsettling story very different to his other books. Probably nearer to 3.5 stars.
—Trelawn
