Engleby: A Novel | Sebastian Faulks

Engleby: A Novel | Sebastian Faulks | A Voice from the Lost Generation

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Engleby: A Novel

	Engleby: A Novel Sebastian Faulks Doubleday, 2007 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 20 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Bestselling British author Sebastian Faulks reinvents the unreliable narrator with his singular, haunting creation?Mike Engleby.

"My name is Mike Engleby, and I'm in my second year at an ancient university."

With that brief introduction we meet one of the most mesmerizing, singular voices in a long tradition of disturbing narrators. Despite his obvious intelligence and compelling voice, it is clear that something about solitary, odd Mike is not quite right. When he becomes fixated on a classmate named Jennifer Arkland and she goes missing, we are left with the looming question: Is Mike Engleby involved? As he grows up, finding a job and even a girlfriend in London, Mike only becomes more and more detached from those around him in an almost anti-coming-of-age. His inability to relate to others and his undependable memory (able to recall countless lines of text yet sometimes incapable of summoning up his own experiences from mere days before) lead the reader down an unclear and often darkly humorous path where one is never completely comfortable or confident about what is true.

Mike Engleby is a chilling and unforgettable character, and Engleby is a novel that will surprise and beguile Sebastian Faulks' readership.

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Lost youth

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.

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A Voice from the Lost Generation

I have been a fan of Sebastian Faulks since reading Birdsong, his novel about being a soldier in World War I. He is interested in the effects of what happens to a person on his consciousness. In the war, the main character endures horrendous events but somehow survives. His survival itself comes to affect his sense of who he is and why he must live, but he has a hard time relating to people who have no idea of what he has been through.

In Engleby, the consciousness of the main character is shaped by the death of his father and the treatment he receives at school from older bullies. He never seems to receive any sympathy from anyone. In fact, he finds that he must suffer his torture alone and pretend that everything is fine. This means that he has to repress the torture and his rage about it so completely that though he has a prodigious memory, he can't really remember the events relating to his anger which turn out to be violent.

The book is written from inside Engleby's head, so we have only what he remembers and chooses to tell us. We don't find out what he has done until the police begin to question him. It takes them years to find the body of the girl Jennifer whom he fell in love with but failed make a real connection with and then killed. The book follows the character into a mental institution and years later, the character imagines the encounter he would have liked to have had with Jennifer which was characterized by warmth, sympathy and sex.

Faulks' gets the details right. When Engleby arrives at school, no one explains anything to him about how things work. He makes a fatal mistake by asking to go to the toilet and is stuck with the nickname Toilet for the rest of his years at the school. The cold, the awful food, the drugs, all the details are relentless. When Engleby goes on to Cambridge, the events are repeated. Without social skills, he relies even more on music, drugs and alcohol. The encounters with the police and the mental health establishment are sharp and carefully observed. Can we hold a psychopath or someone with a personality disorder responsible for murder? Who is responsible for his social education and if it fails what can be done? As usual, everything is worked out in the courts and a place is found for Engleby to be sent away from society which is very like the school where all initially went awry.

The voice of Mike Engleby is so precise, so witty and so self aware that at times it is hard to believe he could have done what he has done. The ironies of his life are all pretty clear to him. He can't really explain his pain, so he makes little jokes and seeks refuge in drugs and alcohol. Truly a voice from the Lost Generation.

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Brilliantly written

In this brilliantly written novel, Faulks manages to make commonplace social critiques fresh and interesting, and a disturbed loner sympathetic and compelling (at least once he gets to college).

Engleby's comments on Jennifer's disappearance are one example of Faulk's wit and sensitivity. "From the moment her face appeared on that poster, Jennifer has stopped being herself.....Something pious has attached itself to her". Later when her posters are taken down, you can see through shop windows so that "The sight of pies and cakes and palms is bought at a price. Their presence is her absence". The portrait of Jennifer, a young woman "naturally at home in the world", nails a particular type of person.

Engleby, and probably Faulks himself, is interested in the nature of time and the meaning of life, reminding me of Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"; Faulks then goes further and connects time to panic. "In panic, time stops:....You then, perversely, want time to appear to run forwards because the future is the only place you can see an escape...But at such moments time doesn't move."

Now, as to the ending. It certainly works very well, but I think the novel would also have worked if Engleby wasn't guilty, and I wonder if the way Engleby suppresses memories is realistic. In Margot Livesey's "The Missing World", amnesia is very important, so Livesey actually justifies her take on it in an afterword.

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Story and character easy to related to

Engleby is an exceptional narrative: the sad tale of a man battling with society as a result of the abuse he's received in his life. Supporting a semi-interesting, often trite plot, Faulkes' mostly first-person storyline pulls us into the mind of this disturbing, yet intriguing, individual with intricate detail and dialogue that becomes an exploration of the human mind.

Throughout the novel, the reader journeys through the seemingly unsettled mind of Michael Engleby. A classic borderline schizophrenic, Engleby has frequent memory loss and is romantically fixated with Jennifer, a girl who is uninterested in him. His intelligence, however, is astounding; he excels through his school years and pursues the field of journalism after graduation-a somewhat ironic career given his apparent inability to relate well to, or even like, people. Without revealing too much of the plot, the story proceeds through twists and turns that almost predictably, result in tragedy and violence.

The book is almost entirely written in the first person in extracts from Engleby's diaries, it is only towards the end that others take a turn at the narration and the reader learns how the world views Engleby-and this view is in sharp contrast to Engleby's version of things.

The true intrigue comes in the way the reader can so easily relate to such a disturbing character. Whether we judge him as sociopathic, narcissistic or simply removed is irrelevant; it is clear that Engleby's ability to relate to other-whether family, friends or schoolteachers-is related to some sort of mental flaw. However, the reader's conflict comes when realizing that many of Engleby's thoughts are highly relatable-Engleby is simply more confident voicing his true opinions without a filter.

It should also be noted that there's also a significant amount of English history that plays into the novel, which those prone to historical fiction will find educational and helps sets a richer context.

Those appreciating the intricate analysis of the mind, this is the book for you. For those more attracted to a juicy, action-driven mystery plot: don't dismiss the read, it's just a slower ride.

Armchair Interviews says: Another good fiction for your reading pleasure.

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creepy ... but darkly funny

In a truly unique novel Sebastian Faulks tells the story of Mike Engleby, a gifted but deeply troubled man. The novel is impressive in the breadth of territory it covers. With skill and assurance, Faulks creates a whirlpool that pulls the reader into the suffocating vortex of Mike's psyche. You know you don't really want to go there but you can't help yourself. And it surely delivers as much as it threatens.
Mike's voice is completely convincing. It is knowing, petulent and alientated. Along with Mike's lonely and profound weirdness, however, there are almost touching examples of his efforts to imitate normality, as demonstrated by his feeble attempts to maintain some sort of relationship with his younger sister. Then there is his enchantment (obsession?) with and knowledge of 60s and 70s rock music. His opinions on that subject are very evocative and funny. On a completely different level the novel works as a mordant commentary on contemporary Britain. Mike, our narrator, has a sharp eye and he does a great joh of nailing some of the cultural icons of the eighties.
But at bottom, this is a tale of tragedy. It raises many questions, not least of which is whether Mike had to turn out the way that he did. Intelligent enough to beat significant odds and secure a scholarship to Cambridge, had he not been failed by family and society might he - and those he affected - have stood a chance?
My only complaint about the book is that it tailed off into an over-long account of the details of Mike's psychiatric condition. This was an unnecessary intrusion to what was otherwise an extraordinary and compelling story.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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