Another Fifty Shades of Grey

Has anyone read this book?

Blimey. Talk about "sinister". I can't decide whether to recommend it to you or not. I couldn't put it down. It's gripping, very readable, erudite, funny in places, and just so clever. I feel I want to read it again, straightaway, to see how all the clues to the narrator's personality and actions are sown through the early stages of the book.

But it's very dark. Don't read it unless you're in a happy place. I found it really disturbing - the most disturbing book I've read since Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk about Kevin. Yes, that disturbing. I read most of it early one morning when I woke at 5.30am and couldn't get back to sleep, and it spooked me out. It took me a little while to reconnect with reality and get on with daily life. Yikes. 

One reason it spooked me is that most of it is set in the university which I attended. Streets and buildings are familiar. The main character, the narrator, Engleby, was there about a decade before I was, but even so, it was close to the bone. I don't like to think that my naive, carefree, unsuspecting young days might have been peppered with creepy individuals like him, without me realising. *Shudder*

The novel explores the (perhaps) hazy area between normal and abnormal. We've all felt on the edges of social situations, out of place, lonely, rejected. Engleby describes those feelings so well, but is also incapable of normal feeling. So what is a feeling? Can you be lucidly self-aware, without being self-aware at all? 

I can see why some people wouldn't like the book. It's a bit laboured, and if you didn't connect with it, then I can imagine that you wouldn't want to plough through it. I've been browsing the reviews on Amazon, and they're mixed. The great majority are positive, but I read some of the negative ones, and I can see where they're coming from. Readers seem to be rather influenced by whether they've read other Sebastian Faulks novels, and how that affected their expectations.

The blurb on the back of my version describes it as "heart-wrenching - and funny, in the deepest shade of black". The blurb-writer has a point. There is black humour in it (which I almost always enjoy). When a friend visits Engleby -- SPOILER ALERT -- in a secure mental health facility, Engleby says 

"Stellings was dressed in what he imagines to be a non-homicidal-maniac-inciting outfit of blue jeans, stone windcheater and open-necked plaid shirt with a nasty little polo pony on the breast pocket".

I quote that partly because it's funny (I think so, anyway, but perhaps it loses something out of context), but also because it demonstrates to me the brilliance of the novel, the unsettling brilliance of it. As a reader, you don't like Engleby, you really don't. And you're right not to. But you also sympathise with him, empathise with him, and find common ground with him (those three things are different... similar, but different... am I right?) Stellings is very kind to go and visit him, but I couldn't help laughing at the "nasty little polo pony", and the acuity with which Engleby sees how ill at ease he is in the institution, knowing intuitively that Stellings' seemingly casual attire has been carefully chosen. 

As I said, I don't know whether to recommend this book or not. It's not an enjoyable book, but  you'll enjoy it. I think "Fifty Shades of Grey" would have been the perfect title for it, because it's the story of one deeply troubled and criminal individual, and the questions he raises about the uncertainties of personality, of identity, of memory, of self-perception. I do want to recommend it, though, because I need someone to discuss it with! The twisty ending, in particular.
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