It’s hard for me to review Engleby without coming over all autobiographical – because just like Faulks’ protagonist, Mike Engleby, and like Faulks himself, I went to Cambridge University. That means I get the thrill of recognition when reading about the narrator’s student years, his experiences around the town, and so on. Curiously, Engleby never refers to Cambridge by name (it’s simply “an ancient university”), but his deliberate mis-naming of certain locations in the city (the pub where Crick and Watson first announced the discovery of DNA is arbitrarily renamed from the Eagle to the Kestrel) provides an early clue as to his unreliability. If we can’t believe his grasp of such basic details, how can we believe him about anything else? This aspect of the narrative turns out to be a crucial one.

Engleby is a narrator deliberately designed not just to be unreliable but to be unlikeable as well: he’s an intellectual snob, an habitual thief, a prolific consumer of booze and drugs, a loner to his very core. To set against this when weighing up his character, we learn about his working class childhood, the death of his father while he’s fairly young, his traumatic time at public (i.e. private) school. On reflection, the cumulative effect of these revelations and discoveries was to make me feel somewhat manipulated by Faulks – he’s trying to make Engleby as difficult to like as possible, yet gets readers to root for him in spite of themselves. Annoyingly, it’s a trick that does work – despite his anti-social tendencies, his lack of self-awareness, his arrogance and his aloofness, Engleby is, if not likeable then at least worth listening to.

Warning: spoilers ahead

The tale of Mike Engleby takes us from his working class childhood, via his schooldays and university education, through to his working life. There are plenty of clues that Engleby is not the full ticket, for instance his infatuation with fellow undergraduate Jenny. It’s in terms of that relationship that Mike reveals problems beyond his fondness for alcohol and drugs – the theft of Jenny’s private diary is an act that seems beyond the pale. When she goes missing, a nationwide manhunt is launched, and Engleby comes under suspicion from the police; but he walks away unscathed, finishes his exams and heads for London and an accidental career as a features writer and journalist. His continuing obsession with Jen leads him to memorise her diary and recite back whole passages, though what purpose these serve other than proving Faulks can do the voice of a 20 year old woman, I’m not quite sure.

Years pass, and we are so acclimatised to Engleby’s idiosyncrasies that what might have seemed strange at the beginning sets off fewer alarm bells – he’s still a loner, he still has trouble forming relationships with women, though some of his journalistic encounters seem a bit far fetched. With the tumult of the early 80s as his backdrop, Faulks reels us in to the strange life of Mike Engleby. The clues as to his fragile mental condition accumulate, and the watershed point is reached when the police come calling again – a badly decomposed body, believed to be that of Jenny, has been found in a field in Cambridgeshire.

It would be wrong to characterise Engleby as a traditional crime novel – it’s not really a whodunnit, as the central character has the motive, the means and the opportunity, not to mention a bargain bundle of personality flaws. As his memories come flooding back to him, doubt is erased and the book becomes more of a whydunnit, and as the police close in our narrator seems destined to end his days in prison or in a mental home. The closing chapters of the book include extensive extracts from psychological evaluations of Mike, which amount to an effective dissection of all of his flaws, illustrated with reference to Mike’s diary, which is of course what you have been (and still are) reading. All very self-referential, although it’s interesting to see which warning signs you might have picked up as you were reading through.

While reading Engleby I was, without doubt, swept up by the narrative and grimly fascinated by its narrator; as an example of empathetic writing featuring a ‘mentally different’ narrator, it’s almost as good as The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Unlike that superlative book, however, I can’t dislodge a lingering feeling that Faulks is showing off, at the expense of creating characters who the reader can really care about – perhaps the disadvantage of having such an apathetic narrator is ending up with apathetic readers too.

Bookmark to