Sebastian Faulks takes his readers on an unexpected spin in the compulsively readable yet deeply disturbing “Engleby” (in stores Tuesday). Readers who are looking for Faulks’ carefully researched historical pieces will find this novel a departure. The backdrop to this sometimes funny yet dark piece is not the echo of battle but rather the politics of the author’s generation.
Engleby is Mike Engleby, or Irish Mike, or Mike(!), or Michèle Watts or M.K. Watson – depending on who is talking. Faulks sets his hook in the first paragraph, using Engleby’s conversational tone to draw the reader in. One can imagine sitting across the table from this young man, enjoying his dry wit: “I’m in my second year at an ancient university. My college was founded in 1662, which means it’s viewed here as modern. Its chapel was designed by Hawksmoor, or possibly Wren; its gardens were laid out by someone whose name is familiar. The choir stalls were carved by the only woodcarver you’ve ever heard of. … The teachers, or ‘dons,’ include three university professors, one of whom was on the radio recently talking about lizards. He’s known as the Iguanodon.” All that’s missing is a snare drum and high hat.
He’s a scholarship student. His family is poor, but his father’s death, combined with a quick intelligence, earned him a scholarship to a private preparatory school, Chatfield, and then to university. But for all that, he does well with his studies, his memory is odd: “big on detail, but there are holes in the fabric.”
These aren’t holes; they are yawning chasms. And as his unself-conscious narrative continues, it becomes slowly apparent something about Engleby is off. He’s a loner who spends his evenings going to pubs that don’t usually attract a university crowd. He aimlessly drives his car, a bottle-green Morris 1100, around eastern England.
The only way he can socialize with his peers is in an anesthetized state, mixing alcohol and drugs to a startling degree: “Tuinal, Nembutal. Amytal, I quite like them; and Quaaludes go well with gin. It all depends. I’ve tried almost all the sleeping pills, even the banned ones, and they don’t even make me feel tired. On the other hand, I’m susceptible to a patent hay-fever cure you can buy over the counter at Boots, which goes to show.”
Though Engleby seems to be meandering through school, he finds purpose in a young woman. Jennifer Arkland, a fellow second-year student, is the reason he shows up at meetings of the Folk Club, then at meetings of a political society and finally at Jennifer’s history classes. But for all that she is the focus of his attention, it seems that he gets little of hers. She is kind; she tolerates him but gives him less thought than she would a stray cat.
Faulks excels at building a sense of unease around his central character. At first he seems little more than a harmless misfit. But drinking and drugs must buoy any social interaction. His attention to Jennifer moves from fixation to obsession. One winter night in 1974, Engleby steals Jennifer’s diary. On the same night, she disappears.
Could Engleby have anything to do with the disappearance? His memory is a slippery thing: “Here I was with a memory that others assured me was freakish in its recall of facts and dates and long passages of writing; yet actions and events in my own past that really should have been able to remember themselves without prompting from even a workaday, let alone a Rolls-Royce, memory – they weren’t there. They were not only unstored, unregistered, not indexed; it was as if these things had never happened.” If the memory is unreliable, so is the narrator.
Jennifer’s disappearance remains an unsolved case and Engleby moves on from university to a career in journalism. He publishes first under a woman’s name, Michèle Watts, ostensibly because the publication is looking to use more female writers. He moves on to a second pseudonym, M. K. Watson, at a new publication. The name changes seem innocent enough, but perhaps he’s trying to leave the identity of Engleby behind. And if his birth name is left for dead, his memories of Jennifer are not.
To read “Engleby” is to be carried in the arms of a master. Engleby’s narrative tone seems dispassionate and removed and the story he weaves is much more complex than initially appears. The interludes of Jennifer’s diary reveal a credible and engaging young woman, and also provide a small glimpse of Engleby as others might see him.
Perhaps being brutalized by upper classmen at Chatfield took a toll, or perhaps the petty thievery that sets so easily with him is an indication of a deeper disorder. But it’s a huge step from a bullied student to killer, and Engleby seems so oblivious to social clues and so uncomfortable with any kind of intimacy that the leap seems both impossibly far and completely plausible.
Robin Vidimos reviews books for The Denver Post and Buzz in the ‘Burbs.
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FICTION
Engleby
By Sebastian Faulks
$24.95
