Mike Engleby is a student from a humble background who has arrived at Cambridge University in the early 70s thanks to a precocious intelligence and a memory of almost savant proportions. He keeps a journal documenting his life, his recollections of a particularly harsh time at a minor public school where he was a scholarship boy following his father’s early death, his taste in prog rock, his infatuation with a certain girl, his prodigious consumption of alcohol and pills and a ‘truly terrible’ event that happens towards the end of his time at college. He warns us not to judge the period in which he is writing by the mores of our future age, and to remember that readers of our own words thirty years hence will look upon our modern age with equal amusement. Engleby leaves college and drifts into a modestly successful career in journalism in London as the 70s give way to the Thatcher years. Inevitably, his past begins to catch up with him, with shocking consequences.
This is an unusual and compelling novel, written largely as a first person journal. What initially seems like an account of typical student hedonism in the style of Kingsley Amis’ ‘Lucky Jim’, slowly becomes something much stranger and darker. It challenges our understanding of time as a continuous narrative, and also the differences between the way we perceive ourselves compared to how we appear to others. It is difficult to say more without undermining the impact of the paradigm shift that occurs in Engleby’s narrative, although in retrospect everything is carefully foreshadowed.
Yet again, I can recommend the audiobook version of this book narrated by Michael Maloney, available from audible.co.uk, which really suits the first person narrative style.
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