"Engleby" by Sebastian Faulks (Vintage, 2008)

In an unnamed city (surely Cambridge, 1973; "The Eagle" is renamed "The Kestrel", there's a General Post Office on St Andrews Street, and there's Parker's Piece) Mike Engleby is a loner student who goes to student events, but doesn't interact. He moves in his 2nd year to Nat Sci (from English in year 1). He follows Jennifer around. He drinks at town and village pubs - he has a car! He has many opinions, e.g. -

Heisenberg and Bohr and Einstein strike me as being like gifted retriever dogs. Off they go, not just for an afternoon, but for ten years: they come back exhausted and triumphant and drop at your feet ... A vole. It's a remarkable think in its way, a vole - intricate, beautiful really, marvellous. But does it ... Does it help? Does it move the matter on? When you ask a question that you'd actually like to know the answer to - what was there before the Big Bang, for instance, or what lies beyond the expanding universe, why does life have this inbuilt absurdity, this non sequitur of death - they say that your question can't be answered, because the terms in which you've put it are logically unsound. What you must do, you see, is ask vole questions. (p.16)

"I wonder if we can ever know what it's like to be someone else" he muses on p.15. He mentions loneliness - "The times you might mind it are when your own company stops entertaining you. In your normal life that doesn't happen, because the routines you develop are one you like - ones that help you through (p.37) ... In general, in less extreme moments, lonely looks after itself. It helps you develop strategies that reinforce it. The comfort of a dark cinema and the company of the screen actors prevent you meeting anyone. Lonely's like any other organism: competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself" (p.38).

We learn that he came from the working class, that he was 12 when his father suddenly died. He won a scholarship to a private school where he had a difficult time. At school he stole. At 18 he was briefly hospitalised after a "panic attack".

Jennifer goes missing, presumed dead. After his degree he drifts into a journalism job in London, interviewing Jeffrey Archer, Thatcher and Ken Livingstone. No close friends - the only person he stays in touch with - Stellings - doesn't invite him to his wedding. After having had gaps in his memory, he now experiences flashbacks. He doesn't know whether they're false memories. He'd opportunistically stolen Jennifer's diary. When he reads that her father killed himself he sends her mother the diary.

Years later he's arrested for murdering Jennifer. It turns out that this book is written in prison. We see a psychologist's analysis of it (why Cambridge isn't mentioned) and read statements from Stellings. From these other viewpoints we see that Engleby's behaviour was stranger than he made it appear. He decides to confess to 3 murders in the hope of being diagnosed as ill.

In Chapter 13 he's 52 and has been in a Special Hospital for 17 years. We learn a few more details, but except for the final page of the book, the final two chapters don't interest me enough.

Other reviews

• Phil Hogan (At times this has the feel of a McEwanesque tale but the central mystery - the presumed murder of Jennifer - is strung out too thinly, hanging across the years like forgotten laundry.)
• Terrence Rafferty (Unlike his previous novels, which were written in the third person, “Engleby” is a verbal performance, and Faulks jacks up the degree of difficulty by choosing to impersonate a brilliant, manic young sociopath. ... Faulks probably doesn’t intend his nutty narrator to be quite as wearying as he proves to be. )
• Jane Shilling (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.)
• Laura Miller ("Engleby" is voice-driven fiction, a big departure for Faulks, who usually writes epic-length war novels about doomed love affairs. ("Birdsong" is the best known.) This one has more of the witty, caustic flavor of an Ian McEwan or Martin Amis novel, with the added bonus of abundant historical texture from the 1970s and '80s)