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A review by ferretonfire
Engleby by Sebastian Faulks
4.0
"My own diagnosis of my problem is a simpler one. It's that I share 50% of my genome with a banana and 98% with a chimpanzee. Banana's don't do psychological consistency. And the tiny part of us that's different—the special Homo sapiens bit—is faulty. It doesn't work. Sorry about that."
The beginning of Engleby by Sebastian Faulks is deeply irritating. The narrator's condescension and generally disgust with society became boring quickly; this made me mistakenly place the novel into the groan-worthy genre of Embittered Failing Male Tells the World Why It Sucks.
I was, thankfully, wrong. This novel is a satire, one which understands its subject (namely, self-absorbed young men) so well that it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that the qualities which made me dislike the novel were intentionally over-the-top. Faulks had been constructing an arsehole-pinata, which readers get to enjoy watching him beat down over the final 200 pages of this book.
To think you know a character well and then have your perspective flipped is always an exhilarating experience, one of the most fascinating an author can provide. As Engleby went on, I came to realise that I had been attributing mistakes of the protagonist with mistakes of the author—yes, the protagonist was an insufferable, pretentious blowhard, but this was to set up an unusual narrative which is easily worth the novel's rocky start.
Aside from the strange story-structure and protagonist, the novel has some fantastic details about life in 70s England. Faulks' portrayal of a "gaslight grey" country still struggling to rise from the ashes of the second World War thirty years on is a convincing one, filled with nice details of dilapidated buildings and soot-smeared skies.
This is, ultimately, a fascinating character study, despite a beginning which may turn off readers who aren't prepared to grit their teeth. The final chapter makes it all worth it, though.
The beginning of Engleby by Sebastian Faulks is deeply irritating. The narrator's condescension and generally disgust with society became boring quickly; this made me mistakenly place the novel into the groan-worthy genre of Embittered Failing Male Tells the World Why It Sucks.
I was, thankfully, wrong. This novel is a satire, one which understands its subject (namely, self-absorbed young men) so well that it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that the qualities which made me dislike the novel were intentionally over-the-top. Faulks had been constructing an arsehole-pinata, which readers get to enjoy watching him beat down over the final 200 pages of this book.
To think you know a character well and then have your perspective flipped is always an exhilarating experience, one of the most fascinating an author can provide. As Engleby went on, I came to realise that I had been attributing mistakes of the protagonist with mistakes of the author—yes, the protagonist was an insufferable, pretentious blowhard, but this was to set up an unusual narrative which is easily worth the novel's rocky start.
Aside from the strange story-structure and protagonist, the novel has some fantastic details about life in 70s England. Faulks' portrayal of a "gaslight grey" country still struggling to rise from the ashes of the second World War thirty years on is a convincing one, filled with nice details of dilapidated buildings and soot-smeared skies.
This is, ultimately, a fascinating character study, despite a beginning which may turn off readers who aren't prepared to grit their teeth. The final chapter makes it all worth it, though.