Engleby
by Sebastian Faulks
We are still in the realms of psychiatry here (moving on from Human Traces) as the main character and narrator, Mike Engleby, soon makes it clear that all is not as it should be. Mike Engleby is a scholarship-bright boy who had an abusive father and a rather hands-off mother and was sent to a boys only ‘public’ school where he is disturbingly bullied (and even more disturbingly, freely admits that he becomes a bully when the time comes). At school, and later on at Cambridge, he becomes adept at petty theft, and this, with his lonely drinking and drug-taking, is possibly where he ‘gets his kicks’. He is quite pleased with how he manages to fool people who he regards as rather stupid.
While he is at Cambridge he meets and develops a crush on a very ‘normal’ girl called Jennifer who very obviously does not return the crush, but is kind to him. Then she mysteriously disappears ….
So the novel is a kind of whodunit as well as being a character study of an intelligent, but deeply disturbed man who finds a niche for himself in journalism for which he has a talent. His observations and descriptions of people and situations are really funny in a cynical kind of way, and he almost becomes normal until memories that he has denied start to intrude on his ‘normal’ life and the novel spirals down as we try and fathom this complex character. Near the end of the book, Engleby reads a psychiatrist’s report that contains interviews with people about their relationship with him, and I found the fact that he was so oblivious to ‘normal’ people’s opinions of him (even the foolish shopkeepers who he stole from apparently suspected something) most disturbing. Do we all see ourselves differently to how others see us?
The author
Sebastian Faulks was born in 1953 and was educated at Wellington College (the dreadful school Chatfield in Engleby?) and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was the first literary editor of The Independent and became deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday up till 1991. He has been a columnist for The Guardian and the Evening Standard and writes for a number of newspapers, magazines and television series. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
His first novel was A Trick of the Light in 1984, followed by The Girl at the Lion d'Or (1989), Birdsong (1993), which we had in the Club recently, The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives (1996) and Charlotte Gray (1998), the latter three set during the Second World War. On Green Dolphin Street (2001), is a love story set against the backdrop of the Cold War. Human Traces (2005) which we have also recently had in the bookclub - about the early days of psychiatry – and lately, Engleby (20
07). Devil May Care is a new James Bond novel commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate to mark the centenary of Ian Fleming's birth in 2008. Faulks lives with his wife and three children in London. He was awarded the CBE in 2002.
Comment on Engleby (Vintage 2008) by Caroline
Woodlands Bookclub Rating: 4
Book no 2155 - Jane U
