After mixed reviews of his medical novel Human Traces, Sebastian Faulks is back on form with Engleby, recently released in paperback.
Until recently, British novelist Sebastian Faulks was best known for a series of novels set in war-time France, the most notable being the phenomenally successful Birdsong. With the publication of Engleby, Faulks has proved he has more strings to his bow, demonstrating an ability to portray a more contemporary setting – Cambridge in the 1970s.
Semi-Autobiographical Novel
Faulks has said of this novel that it is the only one he has really enjoyed writing, perhaps due to its semi-autobiographical nature: Faulks was himself an undergraduate at Cambridge in the 1970s. Presumably it is here the similarities between Faulks and the novel’s eponymous hero end – Michael Engleby is a dislikeable character, and it is to Faulks’ great credit that the awkward persona of the narrator adds to the novel rather than detracts from it.
Jennifer Arkland
The novel begins with Engleby as an undergraduate: “I’m in my second year at an ancient university. My college was founded in 1662, which means it’s viewed here as modern” (page 1). His narrative does not remain chronological, however, as his thoughts move between his current situation – attending lectures and meetings just to be near a History student named Jennifer Arkland – and his earlier life.
We learn that he is a working-class boy who is at Cambridge thanks to a scholarship: “I won a prize to come to my college and it pays my fees; my family’s poor” (page 2). This matter-of-fact tone runs throughout Engleby’s account of his childhood years: further flashbacks reveal he was bullied at school, and despite the sympathy this should arouse in the reader, these episodes provide disturbing insights into the character Engleby is to become. After an incident with Baynes, one of the bullies, young Engleby muses: “Sometimes at night, as I lay in the sopping sheets, I dreamed of killing him. I would show no compassion” (page 63).
Engleby as Unreliable Narrator
Of course, Engleby’s behaviour makes perfect sense to himself, and as we see everything through his eyes we must decide for ourselves the real significance of his actions. He considers himself a friend of Jennifer’s, even a potential lover; the reader can see that he is bordering on stalking her, certainly delusional in thinking she feels some affection for him. When she disappears after a party, Engleby watches the reconstruction of her disappearance with sadness, visits her home town, and memorises the whole of her diary – which he has stolen.
The first part of the novel feels a little loosely structured, a series of unconnected events that fail to cohere or draw the reader in. From the moment of Jennifer’s disappearance, the novel picks up pace and becomes a far more satisfying narrative, as we follow Engleby’s new life as a journalist in the booze-fuelled London of the 1980s. Again, seeing through his unreliable eyes, we are not sure what is truth and what is fiction: does he really interview Margaret Thatcher, Jeffrey Archer and Ken Livingstone? Or does he just imagine this?
Praise from the Critics for Engleby
Eventually, of course, the past catches up with Engleby, and we learn something of what really happened to Jennifer after that party. Faulks allows other voices to contribute to the overall picture of Engleby that the reader must construct: Jennifer, via her diary; James Stellings, Engleby’s only friend; and a psychologist called Dr Exley. The character who emerges from the novel is “both repellent and magnetic” (Scotland on Sunday), a “mind out of joint with its times, and eventually defeated by them” (The Times).
Engleby by Sebastian Faulks is published in paperback by Vintage (2008, 342 pages, ISBN 978-0-099-45827
