Engleby

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Biography
Sebastian Faulks was born on 20 April 1953 and was educated at Wellington College and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He was the first literary editor of The Independent and became deputy editor of the Independent on Sunday before leaving in 1991 to concentrate on writing. He has been a columnist for The Guardian (1992-8) and the Evening Standard (1997-9). He continues to contribute articles and reviews to a number of newspapers and magazines. He wrote and presented the Channel 4 Television series 'Churchill's Secret Army', screened in 1999. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

His first novel, A Trick of the Light, was published in 1984. His other novels include The Girl at the Lion d'Or (1989), set in France between the First and Second World Wars, and the bestselling Birdsong (1993), the story of a young Englishman called Stephen Wraysford and his harrowing experiences fighting in northern France during the First World War. The main narrative is intercut with scenes from the life of Stephen's granddaughter, Elizabeth, a young woman living in the 1970s who travels to France to discover more about her grandfather's life. The Fatal Englishman: Three Short Lives (1996) is a multiple biography of the lives of the artist Christopher Wood, airman Richard Hillary and spy Jeremy Wolfenden.His fifth novel, Charlotte Gray (1998), completes the loose trilogy of books about France with an account of the adventures of a young Scottish woman who becomes involved with the French resistance during the Second World War. A film adaptation of the novel, starring Cate Blanchett, was first screened in 2002. His next novel, On Green Dolphin Street (2001), is a love story set against the backdrop of the Cold War. Human Traces, a book set in the 19th century and telling the tale of two friends who set up a pioneering asylum, was published in 2005. His latest novel is Engleby (2007). He has recently written Devil May Care, a new James Bond novel commissioned by the Ian Fleming estate to mark the centenary of Ian Fleming's birth in 2008.

Pistache(2006) is a collection of parodies and pastiches, mostly from BBC Radio 4's The Write Stuff.

Sebastian Faulks lives with his wife and three children in London. He was awarded the CBE in 2002.

Engleby - Sebastian Faulks
ISBN: 0099458276
Published: Mar 2008
Format: PaperbackPages: 352
Mike Engleby says things that others dare not even think. When the novel opens in the 1970s, he is a university student, having survived a 'traditional' school. A man devoid of scruple or self-pity, Engleby provides a disarmingly frank account of English education. Yet beneath the disturbing surface of his observations lies an unfolding mystery of gripping power. One of his contemporaries unaccountably disappears, and as we follow Engleby's career, which brings us up to the present day, the reader has to ask: is Engleby capable of telling the whole truth?

The inside of an outsider's mind
Jane Shilling reviews Engleby by Sebastian Faulks
'My name is Mike Engleby, and I'm in my second year at an ancient university,' runs the opening sentence of Sebastian Faulks's new novel. With its strange blend of directness and concealment (which ancient university?) and its overtones of formal therapy-speak, this brief auto-identification is more revealing than its blunt economy suggests.

Take Engleby's naming of himself. He begins as Engleby, and to Engleby he eventually returns, but as his confession (for that is what it is) unfolds, it emerges that he has passed his life since childhood answering to names other than his own, his sense of self blurred and fragmented by an accretion of alternative identities. Known as 'Toilet' by the vile bullies at his minor public school, he becomes 'Groucho', 'Irish Mike' and 'Prufrock' at university, later acquiring a brace of journalistic pseudonyms. 'I sometimes saw it,' says Engleby of his parade of other selves, 'as that evolutionary drawing of the crouched ape who by stages turns into an upright human.'

Then there is the ancient university. Institutions are a source of wary fascination to Engleby who, solitary by nature, nevertheless spends many years subject to the arcane rules and preposterous traditions of one institution or another: first his terrible school, then university, followed by Fleet Street. Also high on his (longish) list of preoccupations is the past, which he regards with a mixture of yearning and alarm. He harbours a conviction that time is not linear and dreads the possibility of reincarnation. At the same time he is gripped by nostalgia for a notional past of 'authentic' Englishness. 'Something happened to this country,' he complains, 'perhaps in the 1960s. We lost the past.'

It is the frequent habit of dwellers in one low, dishonest decade to blame its unsatisfactoriness on the lowness and dishonesty of the preceding decade. Engleby is an undergraduate in the early 1970s, an era whose distinctive culture of bad clothes and worse beer, folk music and drugs certainly provided the ideal conditions for nostalgia to flourish.

But gradually it becomes clear that there is a significant gap between the vivid longing of Engleby's internal life and his ability to connect with the external world. The lacuna is most painfully evident in his attachment to a fellow undergraduate, Jennifer Arkland, known as Jen.
Pretty and 'indiscriminately friendly', Jen embraces Mike as an acquaintance among a horde of other friends. He goes to the same lectures, turns up at the same parties, even attaches himself to a trip to Ireland where a student film is being made, starring Jen as a rape victim. Just before her finals, she disappears. Mike is a suspect, but no body is found and the case grows cold. Life goes on. Solitariness notwithstanding, Mike finds a place in the world. The crouched ape unbends. And then a discovery, a belated gesture of empathy, and the fragments of evidence suddenly fall into a coherent pattern.

There is a belief that the perpetrators of heinous crimes are a component short of full humanity. What, though, if someone were to suffer not from a lack but an excess of feeling: an apprehension of the tenuousness of human existence that found expression in acts of extremity? The nature of consciousness, of the indistinct boundary that separates the sane from the normal, the bad from the mad, preoccupied Faulks in his last novel, Human Traces, and continues to engage him here, haunting the convolutions of an elegantly constructed murder mystery, and grimacing in the background of some memorable vignettes from Engleby's life as a journalist (Ken Livingstone, Jeffrey Archer, Alan Clarke are all pungently delineated).

Like Human Traces, Engleby is distinguished by a remarkable intellectual energy: a narrative verve, technical mastery of the possibilities of the novel form and vivid sense of the tragic contingency of human life.

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.