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There is no denying that ‘Engleby’, whose alternative title might well be ‘The Diary of a Madman’, is a clever and well written book. Its main character is a working-class boy who becomes a brilliant scholar despite an upbringing marred by abuse and bullying. His story is told in the first person in a kind of diary form or memoir. As the narrative progresses his personality seems to undergo a transformation and the image of a lonely,downtrodden but essentially nice boy, gradually disappear to be replaced by a person suffering from a personality disorder which might or might not be responsible for the death of a university female student. Recollections of Engleby’s life are interspersed with extracts from the girl’s diary which was ‘borrowed’ during a visit to the victims house. The eponymous hero, or in this case anti-hero, comes across as someone to be pitied rather than being sympathised with. The challenge to the reader is to discover whether what he is being told is the truth or purely the fantasy of a deluded man. When I read that he was drugged to his eyeball most of the time as well as ingesting large quantities of alcohol, I found the character less believable. Also difficult to reconcile are his memory lapses with his assertion that: “I have a world in my mind, in the inexhaustible repertoire of my memory. I can recall at will, note-perfect, from the reams I have stored there.” The device of quoting what purports to be the final entry in Jennifer’s diary to cast doubt on the sequence of events doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. An interesting but flawed novel, in my opinion.

2022-10-16 17:49