I recently finished reading Engleby. It was a disturbing but compelling read.
Engleby is the story of Mike Engleby, told by himself, from childhood through university and adulthood.
Jennifer is an important character in the book. Mike likes her, but she does not seem to be interested in Mike. She goes missing early on. What happened to her? Was she murdered? For most of the book, we don't know, and the investigation peters out within a few pages. Engleby then follows the life of the eponymous hero - wherein he becomes a journalist and ends up interviewing Ken Livingstone, Jeffrey Archer and even Maggie Thatcher - until the point when Jennifer's body is found. I can't say what happens next, but Engleby is not a murder mystery and long before it is actually revealed, one may easily guess who the murderer is.
What makes Engleby disturbing is Engleby himself. His unlikableness comes from the fact that he drinks too much, takes too many drugs, is self serving and, as the precis to the book says, is devoid of any scruple. But perhaps all of these things could be suffered if Engleby tried to redeem himself. Alas, there is no redemption story here. As far as he is concerned, he does what he does and simply moves on. But Engleby is not an intrinsically hateful person. His mistakes - his malice - have their origins not in pure evil but the events of his life, for example, his beatings at the hands of his father and at school, in his own painful shyness and mistaken attempts to deal with that. He is always alone and never tries to make friends or was not able to get one.
Engleby is not a beach book. It is rich work that represents, for me, a return to form for Faulks.
