Picked up cheaply at a charity shop

The only Sebastian Faulks I had read before was Birdsong, and I was in the contrary position of really hating it, so I haven't bothered with anything else by him until I saw this one in a charity shop. It promised that it was a departure for the author so I thought it would be worth giving it a go.

It is definitely different. Mike Engleby is a working class boy who wins a scholarship, first to go to a brutal military boarding school, and then to Cambridge, where he tries to shake off his past and be accepted by his fellow students. He develops an obsession with one of them, an attractive woman called Jennifer, who then mysteriously disappears and is never found. Mike goes on to make something of himself and gets better and better at fitting in, but there is always something about him that's not quite right, and as the story develops we get to find out what it is...

This book is more successful at the beginning, in the early 70s and before, when the protagonist is at school and university. As things unfold, his voice becomes more cultured and educated, and as the plot moves into the 80s and Fleet Street, he becomes less of a curiosity and oddly less likeable. There is skill in the way the narrative voices changes and becomes smoother, but I'm not sure that I didn't prefer it the way it was.

After we spend most of the novel with Mike's voice, it does come as a refreshing change when, near the end, we get to see him through the eyes of two other characters; it cuts through the "unreliable narrator" shtick that can get a little wearing. But the whole thing goes on for too long and it would have been possible to have told the story in a much more economical manner.

Released at York BookCrossing meetup