Engleby by Sebastian Faulks

Mike Engleby is a lucky man.  He grew up in a working class family in England, his father dying young and leaving his mother to scratch out a living and support two children.  Engleby is smart and is able to do so well in school that he wins a place at an exclusive boarding school and then at one of the top English universities.  All is not lucky though.  The boarding school is a prime example of the routinized brutality that boys can adopt toward those that do not seem the same or who do not fall into line.  Engleby's time there is miserable, his nickname Toilet.

When he gets to university, things are better.  He is admired for his intelligence and since the social setup is new, he is able to join clubs and go to pubs with his peers.  As he tells his story, we hear that he is fairly happy, the work easy for him and he feels accepted.  Yet he tells of petty thefts he does without conscience and he is fairly dismissive of many of his fellow students.

There is one student he is never dismissive of.  Jennifer Arkland is a young woman, vibrant in her youth and friendly to all those around her.  She has a boyfriend but Engleby is not put off by that.  He is fiercely attracted to Jennifer and manages to work his way into her social circle by joining the same clubs she does and always being around to help the group in any way possible.  When Jennifer disappears his senior year, Engleby, as her other friends, is dismayed and realizes this event is what tears away the last of the student veneer and makes him an adult.

But what is Engleby to do in life?  He drifts into being a journalist and is as surprised as anyone to find that he is good at it and that it pays well.  He acquires some of the things he never had in his early life such as a flat and a nice car.  He meets influential people as he interviews them for feature pieces and starts a relationship with a woman he meets at work.  He realizes that he is happy but that happiness is shattered when after eight years, Jennifer's body is found.

This book is a departure for Faulks, who is known more for his historical novels.  The novel is written in first person narrative and the reader is introduced to Engleby and sees the world through his eyes.  A slow realization becomes certainty that he is an unreliable narrator and that the world that Engleby sees is not a true representation of reality.  The true Engleby that is slowly revealed is miles from his own perception and the reader ends up horrified at how different reality is when seen from outside Engleby's world.  This book is recommended for literary fiction readers.