Engleby

by Sebastian Faulks

Book Overview

Meet Mike Engleby, a second-year student at university. Despite the fact that Mike is obviously intelligent, and involved in many clubs, it is clear that something about 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?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307387887
• ISBN13: 9780307387882
• Release Date: September 2008
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.1" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

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 h

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.

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.

Food for thought...

(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.

reading during lunch hour

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.