Heroes Not Zombies

Engleby is Sebastian Faulks’ latest novel. It’s written in a very different style from his previous novels but touches on some of the same themes. I read Human Traces recently and really loved it. Both novels are concerned with ideas of consciousness and the creation of the sense of self, but they deal with this in very, very different ways.

The first thing which strikes you about Engleby is that it is written in the first person. It’s difficult to do this successfully for the course of a whole novel, but Sebastian Faulks is a great writer and handles it beautifully. It really works. You have the sense that you are inside the head of the narrator, seeing and experiencing the world the way he does, and, more importantly, getting some sense of his subjective, inner mental processes. The narrator, it quickly becomes clear, is not “normal”. At best he’s a misfit, and, at worst, may even be mentally ill. This reminded me of the excellent “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” by Mark Haddon (excuse me while I digress, but I also recently read Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, and one of his chapters starts with a quote from one of the Sherlock Holmes novels where Holmes solves the crime by noticing “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time” – so THAT’S where the title came from!). In Mark Haddon’s novel the narrator is a boy with autism and the fact it’s told in the first person gives you an understanding of what it’s like to experience the world from the viewpoint of an autistic mind. I think “The Curious Incident…” is a much funnier book than “Engleby” (to be fair, Engleby isn’t supposed to be a funny book!) but it also packed a bigger emotional punch for me than Engleby did (“Human Traces” packs a more powerful emotional punch too). The narrator of Engleby has a mental disorder which means he has difficulty making healthy relationships so the whole experience of the novel is from the standpoint of someone who is a bit cut off from others, who finds social interaction difficult and who is seen by others as strange.

It’s a bit of a whodunnit too because one of the students Engleby knows disappears and for much of the novel it’s not clear what’s happened to her. I’m not going to reveal any of the endpoints of this novel because I do think the suspense adds to the enjoyment of reading it.

Consciousness, memory and the self are core themes of this novel and that really appeals to me. Consciousness, for example, is still not clearly understood and I do think our understanding of it increases by considering it using ALL the tools of philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive psychology AND literature. Drop any of these approaches and it’s harder to understand.

Taken together, “Human Traces” and “Engleby” really contribute to our understanding of the workings of the human mind. I highly recommend both of them but the reader should be prepared for two VERY different books.