Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #520 in Books
• Published on: 2008-03-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Customer Reviews

Tense and Utterly Readable
Having only read Birdsong by Faulks previously and not having enjoyed it much I was reluctant to try this until a friend positively forced it on me. It is very, very different in style and content from Birdsong. It is dark, lucid and modern in tone unlike the Proustian romance of Birdsong.

This is the first person, diary account of the life of Mike Engleby a strange, anti social young man from an impoverished background who through his peculiar intellectual skills manages to rise from obscurity to secure a good place at university and then later as a successful journalist. The story mainly concerns Engleby's obsession with a young woman he meets at university, her disappearance in his final year and what impact this has on him in his future life.

It becomes increasingly dark as the narrative continues and is quite brutal at times, although never in a gratuitous way. Faulks uses these moments of lucid violence as wake up calls and punctuation marks in the narrative, allowing us the reader to see the story in a new and more revealing light.

A fascinating, well written although macabre book. It reminded me very much of John Fowles' novel; The Collector, which I heartily recommend if you like this.

Inside Engleby's head
Mike Engleby is an intelligent working class lad from Reading who has a low opinion of much of humanity. He is an unreliable narrator and reading his account you get the feeling gradually that there is more going on than he is telling you or more than he himself is aware of. In this respect it reminded me quite a lot of Mark Haddon's "Curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

It is not easy to comment on this book without giving away much of the plot. So I will restrict myself to saying that it is well worth reading and you really feel as though you have spent some time inside the head of another human being (an eccentric, interesting and often disturbing one).

hand me a torch - it's too dark to read this far up the rectum
After an engaging and even charming start, this novel slowly and excruciatingly spiralled into freefall.
The classic 'bullied at public school' intermezzoes were well trodden ground and it soon became clear that Engleby is someone we should be seriously worried about rather than engage with. After that, the author adds nothing new to the cliche. Engleby just becomes increasingly ranting and irritating and we are forced to endure it.
I personally lost interest completely after the all too obvious disappearance of Jennifer. What plot, what suspense are other reviewers talking about?! The guy is not quite right in the head and there is no question he killed her. Since we are at that point not really emotionally involved with the Jennifer character (bland middle-class nice girl), I could not really get myself to care. Sorry.
What follows is a tedious tale written in a style so patronising and self indulgent that I wonder whether the author actually shares most of Engleby's distorted values in secret. How often do we have to be told how clever and witty the writing is? And Faulks must have really not enjoyed the time he spent investigating the minute details of drug abuse if he has to ram his intimate knowledge so far up our throat so repeatedly. (If you really want to know what it feels like to be on drugs, perhaps Ginsberg might be more eh...authentic...)
I could go on, but I don't want to repeat myself in as many variations on a theme as the author did in this novel.
By roughly page 80 I was bored and felt emotionally unengaged. Call me cold hearted, but this one didn't do it for me folks.