Customer Reviews

Engleby

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What is wrong with Mike Engleby? Is he really just a working class kid at Cambridge? Is he a sly drug dealer and petty thief? Is he a stalker, a psychopath and a murderer? Perhaps he is just a misunderstood genius. In ENGLEBY, author Sebastian Faulks introduces an unreliable narrator in the tradition of Nabokov's Humbert Humbert. This subtly sinister novel is smart, creepy and unforgettable, just like Mike himself.

In the early 1970s Mike finds himself at Cambridge on scholarship. He actually never names the "ancient university," referring to it instead by clever nicknames both telling and obscuring the truth (this paradox is a key personality trait of his and an important theme in the novel). Mike has survived a brutal childhood, abused by his father and then by classmates at the exclusive boarding school he attended (also on scholarship). It was recognized early on that Mike was smart, but he seemed to attract bullies and trouble. He shares all of this with readers with an eerie detachment.

Cambridge looks like it will be more of the same loneliness and trauma for Mike until he meets Jennifer Arkland, an earnest and attractive young student who catches his eye. Soon Mike is joining the clubs that Jennifer joins and attending her lectures, even though he is enrolled in a different program. They both travel to Ireland to work on a student film. When Jennifer disappears one night after a party, readers are unsure of Mike's connection to the event. Is he really as heartbroken as he says he is at her disappearance, or was he in some way responsible?

The police are curious about Mike and the real nature of his relationship with Jennifer. But there is nothing to connect him to her disappearance, so Mike goes on his way. Despite the fact that he starts working as a journalist, even getting a girlfriend along the way, and seems to lead a normal, if somewhat solitary life, tension continues to build for the reader. Mike is full of rage and sadness. Add to that a drug problem, a keen intelligence, a photographic memory for most things coupled with great gaps in memory concerning other things and an enormous ego, and you have the makings of...well, just what is unclear. Is Mike a reliable source of information about himself, or are readers being manipulated as he tells his story?

One thing is certain. As the decades go by, Mike continues to be obsessed with Jennifer, and when the police come calling on him again, the novel takes a new and frightening direction as some of the secrets he has been keeping are revealed.

ENGLEBY is a very literate book: well crafted and with a nod to classic tales and great authors. Mike is strange and intelligent (but perhaps less so than he thinks), secretive and angry, and one of the most interesting and scary characters in recent memory. Faulks's narration is slow at times, but the mystery of Jennifer's disappearance help make the pace more bearable, and the clinical evaluations of Mike at the end of the book are great, as are the characters' responses to them.

Truth and memory are repeatedly called into question throughout the novel. While Faulks may not have nailed the voice and inner workings of a sociopath, he has written a successful psychological thriller --- at once suspenseful, funny and frightening.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

"One of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people" Michael Engleby.

This book is a masterful re-working of Dr, Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde. Engleby is a loner, a "non-happy" person. He doesn't really seem to know what happiness is. He has an unhappy childhood, filled with abuse heaped on him by his father, his school mates and via the neglect of non-caring adults. His foray into the transitional world of college leaves him faring not much better--he self medicates with drugs; marijuana, hashish, and various pharmaceuticals all washed down with copious amounts of alcohol.

Engleby describes his rages and panic attacks and hints that he has problems with recalling what really happened at such times. He has serious detachment issues with everyone in his world it seems--his family, acquaintances and coworkers--even his girlfriend. When a collge "girlfriend" disappears, the vanishing remains a mystery for many years. Until a body is found and Engleby remembers something.

This book was fascinating, becasue it is told entirely from his point of view--except for the interjected passages from the missing girl's diary, which he has stolen, and a doctor's report and one friend's take on who Engleby may really be--very insightful. I loved the ending and found it to be quite poignant. I highly recommend this book.

This is a difficult review to write without giving too much away. The book begins as a coming-of-age memoir, morphs into a mystery, turns into something else before the mystery is solved, and continues even after that. Very likely, the facts will not come as a surprise to most readers -- but that does not matter, for by then Faulks has moved far beyond the conventional whodunnit. The mystery is merely a peg on which to hang an eerily fascinating portrait of the title character, displayed against a detail-perfect collage of British life in the seventies and eighties.

The novel is the memoirs of Mike Engleby, a clever boy from a poor family who wins scholarships to a boarding school and thence to university, where he falls in love at a distance with Jennifer Arkland, a talented student from another college. Although Mike is coy about identifying it by name, the university is clearly Cambridge, my own alma mater, so perhaps my fascination is biased. Faulks' picture of student life in the early seventies is extraordinarily evocative, down to mentions of the cafes and pubs most favored by students; his excerpts from Jennifer's journal recall with almost painful recognition the heady mixture of intellectual discussion, romantic exploration, and the sheer joy of being young and independent in the company of one's peers.

As the book's cover will tell you, Jennifer suddenly disappears. A more conventional mystery novel might have contained the entire story within the university setting (or even a less conventional one, such as Kate Atkinson's brilliant CASE HISTORIES, also set in Cambridge). But Mike's narrative extends back by more than a decade to include memories of his upbringing and of his particularly horrible boarding school. It also stretches forward to embrace his life in London as a journalist, pursuing his own brand of irreverent enquiry with famous subjects such as Margaret Thatcher on the eve of her power. It may seem that some of these episodes go on too long, but they are all pulled together at the end. For even after the novel has become a whodunnit again, and the mystery has been solved, Faulks continues for fifty more pages, sorting out the events of the past and arranging them in a new perspective. The extraordinary final pages are like a distilled essence of the whole; some may think their message chilling, but I found it curiously touching. We can appreciate life not only from what goes right in it, but also from the pathos of lost chances.

Sebastian Faulks is a marvelously varied author. He has written romances such as THE GIRL AT THE LION D'OR, war stories such as BIRDSONG and CHARLOTTE GRAY, and a novel about the early years of psychiatry, HUMAN TRACES -- an interest that resurfaces here. He has even channeled Ian Fleming in the latest James Bond adventure, DEVIL MAY CARE. True, he can be very uneven, but I find ENGLEBY his best work since the astounding BIRDSONG. The New York Times critic compares Faulks to Nabokov, and I see his point; the characters and their obsessions may be different, but in creating a narrator whose company one enjoys even while disapproving of his habits, Faulks brilliantly conjures up the ghost of Humbert Humbert in LOLITA.

(N.B. if you haven't read this book there may be more here than you want to know).

Sebastian Faulkes can write and he can weave a gripping story, witness "Birdsong", but when he hits top form he achieves what few authors can: he makes you think. His seriously under-rated "A Fool's Alphabet", with its disjointed and superficially unstructured story, did just that by immersing you into the life of its lead character and "Engleby" does the same. Only here, what Faulkes is dealing with is a more complex and much darker personality... someone who is highly intelligent and disarmingly likeable but who is also extremely "odd" and quite possibly completely "mad".

Lengthily, sometimes ponderously but in the end wholly effectively, Faulkes explores Engleby's life and immerses you into his mind through the use of his first person diary... a clever trick that completely anchors all of the narrative to Engleby's own interpretations of events. And, of course, precisely because of his "condition", his recollections swerve from the wholly believable to the confusingly unbelievable and, in the end, deliver no clear answers as to exactly what's happened or, indeed, whether any or all of it is "true". A situation that will be frustratingly annoying for anyone wanting a straightforward A to Z story with a believable conclusion but which is wholly in line with the thought processes and problems in dealing with them that someone in Engleby's mental state would actually face.

Food for thought then, but there's more. Firstly, Faulkes is dealing with something that he experienced first hand - Cambridge University in the early 1970's - and he uses this knowledge to fully capture this odd but fascinating time & place. Secondly, he uses Engleby's character to explore a number of complex philosophical and psychological questions, in particular: what is "reality"; how do "loners" see themselves, act and make sense of their actions; why do people become serial alcohol & drug abusers; and, how are they pushed "over the edge" into acts of uncontrollable rage and violence. And finally, his writing is not only brilliantly insightful but in places genuinely moving, for example:

"I wondered how many of the bright-eyed boys - their parents' treasures, the comets of their hope - were now in Fulbourn or Park Prewitt, fat and trembling on the side effects of chlorpromazine: an entire life, fifty indistinguishable years, in the airless urine wards of mental institutions because one fine May morning in the high spirits and skinny health of their twentieth year they'd taken a pill they didn't understand, for fun." Stunning...

"Engleby" may not be what you want or expect in a novel but if you're prepared to open your own mind to the issues it raises and think about its unanswered questions it will stay with you for far, far longer than most.

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.

Slight spoiler warning! This is one of those books that is difficult to discuss unless you give *some* indication of what's going on.

When you meet Engleby, it doesn't take long to realize that something is "off" about him. To me, he appears more "Asperger's Syndrome" (especially because of his memorization skills) than "sociopath", but since you never get a definitive answer to the question, I suppose it could be either/or/both/somethingelse. And since Engleby is your narrator, you also aren't sure what you should or shouldn't believe. What isn't said is sometimes more important than what is.

This was a decent read if you're willing to make the investment. Sometimes Engleby's train of thought is a little random, and I have to admit I found myself skimming several parts. And while I liked seeing the professionals' assessments of Engleby (especially when followed up by his own narcissistic reactions to them), I could have done without "the journal of Engleby after 18 years of treatment". I think I would have rather left that to my imagination, though a sardonic wink to the reader at the end would have made it all worth it.

Faulks has written a wonderful story. "Engleby" is told by the young man himself: Michael Engleby. It is his story: the emotionally decisive initial experience at University, first time away from mother, father, and his younger sister Julie. Faulks gets the particulars right, practical and psychological. The clubs, changing majors, the showers and tubs and the dampness, the bullies. One feels lonely and deprived reading it: a memory of one's own experience at school.

The story takes place in the 1970s. In a strong point of the book, we are treated to a vivid re-experiencing of the British popular music and drug scene, recounted through Engleby's eyes and ears. This is another strong point of Faulks' telling. (It reminds me of the film "Blow Up," with the sixties scene in England serving as the vessel for the plot.)

Faulks gets into his protagonists's mind. This is the book's great achievement. Faulks' imaginings are Michael's and they become ours; we come to know what it is like to be Michael. Like many of us, away at school, the young man hesitantly dabbles in activities, like the theater, then backs away - towards the drugs and pubs, even "nicking" bicycles. He can't quite, or does not wish to, become part of the scene. He worships a young lady, Jennifer, but only from afar. He is not a dater. How he feels about himself in this regard - and in his other aspects - is hauntingly authentic.

Slowly, Michael's loneliness and his obsesion with "Jen" edges the story forward. Soon, we learn (from his second-hand reports) that she has gone missing. Michael, saddened more than alarmed, continues to re-create her through his gifted, and near-perfect memory, because, he wants to keep the pretty girl alive.

M. develops into a young adult - becoming a first-rate journalist with a real and realized love life. His life is, maybe, not what he expected (Who expects anything?), but he is content. Then a body is found and a mystery ensues. Michael stands at its center - as he is telling it of occurs. (Faulks does a masterful job of letting the reader come to his or her own conclusions about the nature of subjectivity: a single mind, by itself, of itself, describing the world "outside" through itself. In fact, this is the nexus of the novel.)

Faulks' book could have been a wonderful work had he eliminated what I believe to be his own voice, expressing opinions on just about everything, from music, to politics, to war, education, journalism, even Margaret Thatcher. One of the risks of writing first person fiction is giving the author carte' blanche to say what it is on *his* mind.

Second, and more offensive (to me) is the unhappily-all-too-frequent whomp of psychiatric jargon and opinions about the field. Writers today should make every effort to eliminate ths stuff, in favor of letting the characters demonstrate their own all-too-human qualities. This is the kind of thing that prompts one to limit one's English-language novel reading to those written before Freud('s fame) and the DSM: the likes of Hardy, Dickens, Woolf, Henry James, Fitzgerald, even Edith Wharton.

I don't read many novels because I am lazy and fact is so much easier to "get into" and "get out of" than fiction. However, fiction is ten times more rewarding than fact because it is in fact so much harder to remove yourself from the here and now and place yourself in the there and then. I have not picked up a novel that has gripped my attention like Engleby did for the last seven days. Yes, I even read Engleby on my lunch hour, and almost missed a subway stop or two, which says something.
Like the other reviews you can't discuss the plot without giving up the best parts. Needless to say, you should run out and buy this book.

If we think of Engleby as a whodunit, then I suppose its line of descent is from The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. However whodunit writing has come on a long way since Aunt Agatha's time, and in the hands of so sophisticated an artist as Faulks I don't suppose many habitual readers of novels would expect anything from him to fit neatly or exclusively into such a category. I am not myself a frequent peruser of novels, but I have read Birdsong and I own Faulks's 10-cd audiobook devoted to the history of the English novel, and those between them were enough to put me in the right frame of mind to appreciate Engleby.

There is very little about people's relationships in this novel, and next to no sex (although wait for the last page), and all that, to me, is a blessed relief. We hear about life at Cambridge from the diary of the girl student whose disappearance prompts the manhunt that subsequently puts a spotlight on Engleby: we hear a direct assessment of Engleby from his one and only friend, (whatever the friendship really amounts to); but the bulk of the story is a matter of considering the universe via the mind of the book's eponymous hero. Sex and relationships do not figure largely in Mike Engleby's world, so the interest (supposing you find any) of the narrative is largely in what he thinks. He has views on most things normally considered important, and some of them are `normal' views, but you can scarcely fail to find something odd about his seeming sang-froid over matters that would stress out most of us. If my student staircase in college had been roped off by the police, for instance, while they carried out an exhaustive search of my room trying to find the body of a missing person, I doubt that either I or anyone I know could have been so matter-of-fact about it all. Nevertheless, normal or other, his thoughts are never stupid and often genuinely profound, and you can hardly not notice that either.

Trying to balance the matter, let me say that Engleby is not exclusively a novel of ideas, even if we lump the very sharp and astute perceptions of certain famous people - Alan Clark, Sir Ralph Richardson, Ken Livingstone and Margaret Thatcher no less - into the general pot of ideas and observations. The ideas are mainly those of one highly singular individual for one thing, and the cumulative depiction of the said individual is in the specific realm of psychology rather than of a general world-outlook. However in the background there is always the lurking issue of the missing persons investigation, and there are genuine events, real and true action, in connexion with that. How could there not be, indeed? As well as this, a journal of this kind has to feature a string of day-to-day events. Among these I suppose we can include what must be the most casually introduced and summarily ended affair in recent literature. It is almost as if it had to be moved to the out-tray before we got more interested in it than the narrator himself seems to be.

It all - personality and action -- coalesces around the missing person, and in a way that is partly surprising and partly not. This is the basic linking thread of the narration, but it is not easy to grasp what has really happened and how she and he interacted. Not that it is meant to be easy, of course. You may think (I did) that the issue was explained, Poirot-style, well before the end. Probably, indeed, it is, but for the second time in a short review let me add a caution not to make up your mind finally before you have read the last two pages. One of the deeper perceptions of Mr Mike Engleby is that time is not necessarily linear, and he reminds us of that explicitly just before the curtain comes down.

It is all beautifully written, precisely as you would expect. You can't tell me either that all the thoughts and apercus put into the mouth of Mike Engleby are entirely those of a fictional character and not the author's own, in whole or in some part. The narration of life in a public school is not just so revolting but also so corrosive that it has to come from the heart as well as from the head and artistic creativity. One detail did surprise me all the same: however a scholarship boy reacted to this uniquely British environment, he never in my experience retained a strong regional accent as Mike says he did (again without making an issue of the matter). Stephen Fry spotlights the diction perfectly when he says that `house' is pronounced `hice', and what sounds as `taste' would actually be written `toast'. However in general can I recommend this novel? It fascinated me, and I don't know how far I can generalise from that.

Having enjoyed but not been amazed by Charlotte Gray and Girl in the Lion d'Or, I expected Engleby to be nothing more than an entertaining weekend read. I was wrong--and pleased to be wrong. The craftsmanship of the writing becomes even more apparent on a second read, and the way in which Faulks creates empathy for a character who on the surface level is barely likeable is masterful. Seemingly simple and straighforward, Engleby the book--like Engleby the character--is rich with layers of imagery and epiphanies.