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| Author: Sebastian Faulks
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: £7.99
Buy New: £4.86
You Save: £3.13 (39%)
New (29) Used (19) from £0.90
Avg. Customer Rating:  94 reviews
Sales Rank: 306
Media: Paperback
Pages: 352
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.7 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0099458276
EAN: 9780099458272
ASIN: 0099458276
Publication Date: March 27, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually dispatched within 24 hours
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| Customer Reviews:
 A book with a 70's Soundtrack November 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The ultimate accolade - reading this on a twelve hour flight, I felt dismayed when we were coming in to land.
The plot is very basic: Engleby is a Cambridge university student in the early 70's who has a massive crush on a fellow student who mysteriously disappears.
Anyone who was at university in the 70's is going to love this. There should be an Engleby soundtrack, with every single one of the tracks he mentions so nostalgically. For him, music ended with Don't you Want Me in 1981...he pines for Focus and Cream, Amen Corner and Yes. (If only there could be a CD of the book). And anyone who knows Cambridge and London is going to relate to the detailed geography of the book as well - as well as the pubs and politics of the 70s and 80s.
It's an intelligent, thought provoking look at life, what it entails, whether one truly engages with it fully, or is "conscious but not aware" - and especially what "being normal" entails. It is full of lines like "one of the hardest things about being alive is being with other people" and asides such as "her voice was gentle and low, and excellent thing in woman" - I got this one but probably missed many more, Sebastian Faulks being highly erudite as well as getting in a few sly digs about modern education, including the fact his protagonist despairs at someone he is teaching (who he knows is bad at maths) getting an A* for his GCSE.
We should not like Engleby the man; but strangely we do. We get inside his head, and inside the head of the missing Jennifer through the pages of her diary, which leaves us feeling so uplifted and optimistic about life. But it is Engleby who really understands her love of life - though he himself could not be more detached from it.
 Worth a Read October 23, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book is OK but still nothing special. Well written, different and a quickish read. However, it becomes relatively easy to see where the story is heading from fairly early on. There is yet another foray into psychiatry, and I really hope Faulks gives this topic a rest now from his books. Maybe he has been well acquainted with the couch himself, or has Psychiatry friends, but he needs to write about something else. Overall, this book is still worth a read though.
One of his best October 18, 2008
This is one of his best novels yet! I couldn't put this book down and I will definitely read it again - not something I often do. The subject matter is very different compared to his other novels but he still provides the reader with his trade mark of excellent research and attention to detail. Looking forward to his next one!
Sympathy for the devil October 14, 2008
From the first page to the last, an absolutely compelling novel. The voice of Engleby is wonderful, arrogant and biting but lonely and compelling. The evocation of Cambridge in the seventies makes you feel you are there (which sounds awful, as though it this was something precious, precisely the opposite of what it is). And very gradually, you start to see the truth, a truth which is inevitable but which you can hardly bear to believe. Then read the last page, and let a tingle touch your spine....
Tense and Utterly Readable September 24, 2008
Having only read Birdsong by Faulks previously and not having enjoyed it much I was reluctant to try this until a friend positively forced it on me. It is very, very different in style and content from Birdsong. It is dark, lucid and modern in tone unlike the Proustian romance of Birdsong.
This is the first person, diary account of the life of Mike Engleby a strange, anti social young man from an impoverished background who through his peculiar intellectual skills manages to rise from obscurity to secure a good place at university and then later as a successful journalist. The story mainly concerns Engleby's obsession with a young woman he meets at university, her disappearance in his final year and what impact this has on him in his future life.
It becomes increasingly dark as the narrative continues and is quite brutal at times, although never in a gratuitous way. Faulks uses these moments of lucid violence as wake up calls and punctuation marks in the narrative, allowing us the reader to see the story in a new and more revealing light.
A fascinating, well written although macabre book. It reminded me very much of John Fowles' novel; The Collector, which I heartily recommend if you like this.
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