(Book is better with Radiohead – OK Computer (all songs), Bach – G minor, T-rex – Debora and Saint Saens – the Swan)
Engleby by Sebastian Faulks
“We’re deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can’t hear it.”
I never knew earlier that such a book existed, to be honest, I did not know that such an author existed. William Faulkner, I know. But Sebastian Faulks, I didn’t. We were at this book sale that sold second-hand books and the proprietor asked us to buy another book, in that way our total would be rounded off. And this book, Engleby was the nearest. Someone left it discarded at the checkout place. “Do you want to get it?” asked dad. I haven’t heard of this guy. And the cover doesn’t look much inviting too. But in the end, I bought it. It sat in one corner of the bookshelf crammed with other books that were the same shade of colour (yes, my bookshelf is colour-coded.) for about four months. I’d be done by then, reading all the other books bought. There was too much of indolence and a blasé attitude towards that book. I could not just get myself to read it. But at one point while at home, I was like let me take this back to the hostel, try reading it over there.
And yesterday, another month later I started this (aggressively weird) book out of end-semester-exams-stress induced boredom. The first few hundred pages are a drag (like all the other Goodreads reviews said), nothing really happens but the pace picked up furthermore pages later (which the Goodreads reviews don’t talk about). They probably lost patience. This book has a lot of negative responses than positive comments. Probably because Engleby elegantly delineates the human psyche that so much of truth or conformity to reality and us; taste very bitter to our conscience that people would rather not read the book.
There are some books that feel like a paralytic slap across the cheek, there are some that soothe and rock you to sleep, there are some that take you to Utopia with Saint Saens playing in the background. But Engleby to literature is what smorgasbord is to a banquet. A paralytic, mind-numbing slap that returns with a kiss but in a fist aimed at the jaw. So Michael Engleby is from a barely-making-ends-meet family at Reading. He is an introvert, intellect, iconoclast and an anti-feminist to be brief. He hates psychology/psychologists primarily because he thinks human behaviour is more than just a discovered pattern.
“They’re so attached to their patterns that they’ve forgotten rule number one of human behaviour: there are no patterns. People just do things. There are no such things as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation.”
It is set at Cambridge (he’s on a scholarship). He takes History and Natural Sciences. He likes a girl, Jennifer also the reason why he attends History. She goes missing one night. And the novel sets about her missing case and the physical and mental ontogenesis of Mike through the years.
The weird, weird part, personally was that I could relate to the character. The Cantabrigian Psycho as some reviews call him. But the parts I could relate to was, when he chose reading and music over socializing, his deaf attribute towards fashion, and the futility of swearing and expletives and that he never cared about anything. But later on, after another few hundred pages he was so pulled into blue pills, smoking and almost every night was led by an evening of bacchanal revelry and pickpocketing too entered the scene by then. So I kind of lost the Mike I could relate to through the pages forward. I have never read quite a book like this, to be true. It has the element of mystery to it, a huge turn of events in the last few chapters takes you to the 70s London, the music, the politics, the protagonist’s claptraps of London and people in general and most importantly there’s alcohol, at least a pint per page.
“This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.”
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