Author: Sebastian Faulks
Publishers: Vintage Books
Price: Rs 295
Sebastian Faulks proves his talent in Engelby, without doubt. The story is narrated by Mike Engleby. The protagonist is telling his story beginning in the 1970s with his second year at an ancient university.
Engleby has already lived a difficult life, bullied at school and beaten by his father, and he isn't fitting in well at university. He's detached, rude, and possibly with an unsound mind.
He becomes fascinated with a female student named Jen, following her, if not stalking her, wherever she goes, until he discovers her diary and her comments about him. When Jen disappears, the police consider Engleby a suspect, but her body is never found. He goes on to become a journalist, but as a narrator to his own life's story, he's unreliable, and it all begins to unravel on him.
Sebastian Faulks' novel has received mostly positive reviews. Telegraph wrote: “Within the grand design of his narrative themes, Engleby's systematising nature allows Faulks the opportunity for bravura flourishes of 1970s period detail - the drugs, the music, the florid excesses of pre-Murdoch newspaper printers, the serpentine convolutions of suburban roundabouts, and so on. The combination of serious purpose and playful execution is intensely exhilarating.”
Set in the 1970’s in Oxford and London, Engelby is a stunning portrait of a life going terribly wrong ,told by the protagonist as who really doesn’t see his world unfolding around him – to a very dramatic conclusion.
Faulks writes it in the same way that you peel an onion – stripping off layer after layer, till the end - all that’s left is the naked truth. It’s really terrific.
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