Engleby

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Sebastian Faulks

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Pages: 352 (Paperback)

ISBN: 0091794951

Pub: Vintage

Pub date: 2007-05-03

Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 332663

Reader Reviews:

Intriguing (2/2 people found this helpful)

Engleby is a fascinating read, only just occasionally losing pace mid=section. The narrator, Mike Engleby, builds up a strange relationship with the reader, sometimes Iago-like in sinister mode, at other times human and credible, even wryly amusing on occasion - this novel plays with the concept of the unreliable narrator. From Engleby's disturbed childhood, to the harshness of his public school, following his academic path at Cambridge through to his later career as a journalist, the reader is constantly left wondering about the truth, culminating in a chilling finale - the novel never fails to disturb, enhanced by Faulks' clarity of style and control of material. Enjoyable - perhaps not always, but intriguing, certainly.

Fascinating period piece (0/0 people found this helpful)

Very well written, sharp and sparse, letting out the teases one by one, buried in the detail. It's quite easy to spot what's coming, but that's probably how it's meant to be. I did enjoy the way the Faulks builds a great deal of empathy for Engleby but then twists your perceptions inside out. I stayed up till four in the morning to finish reading it. I couldn't quite bear the long haul of his WWI novels, but this had a very pleasing blend of stylised artistry and realism which allowed enjoyment of how the tale was told as much as what the tale actually was. However, it's not as original as some are making out. John Fowles' The Collector is a far superior work, and written a long time before this. The reconstruction of the period felt spot on, and I think I was there.

Faulksy does it again! (1/3 people found this helpful)

So, i REALLY liked Human Traces....and this was good too! BUT wat is it with these alst 2 books? Is Sebastian a totoaly furstrated psychiatrist. Judging by his research for both books, he has read enough round the subject to cosndier practicing!
He is obviously very interested in the human psyche, and his passion for fact finding and general investigation around the area is second to none. Such information both drives and informs his novels and inadvertently develops further depth to his main characters. My only criticism is of his tendancy to avoid 'beefing' up supporting characters through similar personality development processes.
This said, as ever, brilliant book. I have worked in mental health for 16 years and (for what its worth!) the diagnosis was spot on (HE knows what I'm talking about!)

So, congratulations on another brilliant novel, used to explore his passion around psychiatry.

I dont know what previous novels alluded to, though I plan to find out.

"I don't like being rumbled. I like to be invisible." (8/9 people found this helpful)

(3.5 stars) Recreating the life of Mike Engleby from his childhood in the 1960s until 2006, when he is fifty-two, author Sebastian Faulks succeeds in making this novel both readable and intriguing. He is hard pressed to make Engleby interesting in his own right, however, since Engleby has spent his life avoiding contact with other people. The only clues we have about his interior life come from his statements that he genuinely prefers to be alone and from his own account, in which he often blames others for his isolation. Most fictional characters come alive through the reader's observations of characters interrelating with each other, but Engleby deliberately denies the reader this access, presenting a formidable challenge.

Though he is reluctant to communicate his inner thoughts, Engleby is effusive in providing details about his physical surroundings and his daily life. Recording everything in a journal (which becomes this novel), he tells about his earliest memories and his father's beatings, and continues through college, his career as a successful journalist, and his life with a woman and her child. Because he will not let the reader know him, the reader must often depend on accounts of important events provided by other people. As these events become more numerous and begin to involve Engleby more directly, the author develops significant suspense leading to a dramatic climax.

It is not possible to provide a plot summary here without including spoilers. It is enough to know that the novel is a psychological study of an increasingly remote character and his relationship to events around him. Engleby is very bright, a poet who has changed majors from English to natural history. He worships from afar a girl in his college class, and becomes a successful journalist. He spends a great deal of time driving around, drinking heavily, and relying on pills, both licit and illicit. He has been a drug dealer during college, a time in which he also engaged in picking pockets and stealing.

Faulks's prodigious narrative talents, expressed through Engleby's journal, keep this novel moving, despite the reader's possible puzzlement over where it is going and why. As he roams through life, Engleby comments on wars, the displacement and anger of immigrants, the concept of past and present, and questions of who we are and who we might have been. This is almost enough to keep the reader fully engaged until the climax, at which point the number of revelations is startling. Psychiatric reports provided in the last third of the novel help to fill in the blanks and provide resolution, even as Engleby himself is giving his opinions of Tony Blair and the invasion of Iraq. An unusual novel, significant for its distanced and disconnected main character, Engleby provides the reader with an opportunity to "play detective" or "play psychologist." Mary Whipple

Unexpectedly haunting (17/17 people found this helpful)

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.

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