GUEST REVIEWS

From time to time reviewers who are not regular contributors to the newsletter provide reviews.  This page is for them.

SEPTEMBER - OCTOBER  REVIEWS

ENGLEBY
SEBASTIAN FAULKS
Doubleday  September, 2007

Mike Engleby, the snarky narrator of this snarky mystery/social commentary, says "My own diagnosis of my problem is simple," he explains. "It's that I share 50 per cent of my genome with a banana and 98 per cent with a chimpanzee. Bananas don't do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that's different - the special Homo sapiens bit - is faulty. It doesn't work. Sorry about that."

But there's more to it, that he doesn't recognize.

Born very intelligent into a lower class family, Engleby never recognizes what a handicap his background is, never acquires any of the social graces needed to move among the people he meets when he attends Cambridge on a full scholarship. He studies English first, then Natural Sciences, drinks too much, uses too many drugs, listens to lots of pop music very critically, crashes parties where his contemporaries are appalled by his clothes, hair, manners and scathing but klutzy attempts at witty conversation.

For a hundred pages or more, he's just as annoying to the reader. He has an opinion on everything, mostly very negative, and is compelled to express every one of them. These days, he'd have a blog.

He becomes obsessed with campus beauty Jennifer, steals and memorizes her diary, and puzzles over her occasional mentions of him—Mike(!)—with no idea of the exasperation that exclamation point might express. Then he steals her bicycle, setting her up to accept a ride home in his Morris 1100. She disappears.

He graduates and moves on to a career in tabloid journalism. Faulks, a former journalist himself, gives Engleby some very funny lines about how dead easy the work can be, and a couple of hilarious interviews with the famous, including then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher and rightist author Jeffrey Archer.

The senses of place and time are eerily accurate — it was the Monty Python era, when caustic comments and sneering analysis of politicians were so popular.

When Jennifer's corpse is found years later and Mike lands in a Special Hospital , or asylum for the criminally insane, the story becomes an absorbing and poignant psychological study. It's a departure for Faulks, who has written successful historic novels, and from the conventions of the mystery genre.  RECOMMENDED.

 - Sophie Annan Jensen

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