There wasn’t any sex in ‘Engleby’, nor any war either, but it was still a very good book. It tells the story of a guy called Mike Engleby who has come from a very working class background to study at Cambridge University. He is a strange character; obviously very intelligent and articulate, and yet he doesn’t seem able to get out of bed in the morning without a swig of alcohol and his drug taking, both medicinal and recreational, is prolific. He also isn’t going to win any prizes for integrity, seeing as he appears to supplement his university scholarship by stealing from whoever he comes into contact with and occasional dealing of weed. That said, the novel is written in the first person from his point of view, and so you do feel empathy for him from the start. Whenever he does something, you are able to understand why even if it does seem a little odd. On the whole he seems an eccentric but harmless sort of guy.

And then he suddenly finds himself embroiled in one of the most notorious crimes of the decade (the novel is set in the 70s). There’s a girl at uni called Jennifer, who he sort of fancies. He’s not asked her out and it never really becomes clear whether or not she is going out with someone else, but he admires her from afar and is always seeking out opportunities to spend time with her. He makes sure he turns up at the same parties and society meetings, and he starts attending her history lectures despite the fact that he is reading Natural Sciences. Then, one day, on the way back from a party, she simply disappears without a trace. Missing, presumed dead, although the police fail to find a body or a weopon. All her close acquaintances are suddenly under the spotlight. Mike is interviewed too, at first in a polite sort of manner. Later the police come back and tear his room apart, searching under the floorboards and breaking down the plasterboard walls. Nothing comes of it, and Mike is free to get on with his life.

The narrative skips several years and Mike is now a newspaper journalist, living by himself in London and writing features for a national paper. He seems to earn an adequate amount of money, and as time goes on he even ends up moving in with a woman. His life appears to be cruising along nicely, although there are still references to him taking little blue pills whenever he gets stressed, and he seems prone to strange panic attacks and lapses of memory. He has an amazing, photographic memory, and has committed the whole of Jennifer’s diary, which he stole before she disappeared, to hear. Just sometimes he appears to have a blank, or else he can ‘remember’ something but is not entirely sure whether or not it is true.

Time moves forward to the late 80s, and one evening when watching tv Mike sees a newsflash that the badly decomposed body of a young woman has been found in the Fens. The suspicions of the police are confirmed when dental records show it to be that of Jennifer Arkland who disappeared all those years ago. One day Mike gets into work to find a note on his desk asking him to ring the inspector. There follows a tense interview in which he is not under arrest but is vigorously questioned about his movements on that fateful night and his relationship with Jennifer. The policeman is convinced that he did it and urges him to confess, but Engleby protests his innocence… And then the text becomes interspersed with flashbacks as his brain begins to recall buried memories. But are they real memories or invented? Did he kill Jennifer, and if so why? Has he killed other people in the past? Has the narrative which he has been spinning us been cleverly edited to stop us realising the truth?

Hmmm. Well I won’t answer those questions so that I don’t spoil it for other people, but it’s very good, and whilst it is ultimately a rather dark and thought provoking book, there are definitely some moments of humour in it. It’s the sort of book which, now I have got to the end, I would like to go back to the beginning and reread certain parts of to see if I could see the signposts I initially missed.

I can’t, however, because I am in Bolton and I didn’t pack it in my bag. Bolton isn’t as ugly as I imagined and my hotel room is okay. It’s a bit too close to a Wacky Warehouse for my liking and the food in the pub next door is the horrible microwaved variety of British pub food which would give even Wetherspoons a run for its money in terms of crapness, but that I at least expected. I have a sofa at any rate, and I have just been vandalising the security settings on my computer to see if I can connect to the hotel wifi. We’ll see. The job is utterly utterly crap, as I’m supposed to be auditing a housing association but have never had any housing association training and only have a vague layman’s impression of what they actually do. I can’t access the prior year files to see what last year’s auditors did because the work was completed by people from a firm which has now merged with my firm, using a bespoke piece of software which I don’t have access to. The upshot is that my work this week is going to be poor in the extreme, but I think I can make a good case for the defence if anyone makes that accusation at me, and in any case I’m highly unlikely to see any of these people ever again! Hmmm, I’m a little bored and would probably go for a walk if I hadn’t acquired a nasty blister yesterday which makes walking a bit uncomfortable. Tempting as it might be to drink myself into oblivion in the hotel bar with the remaining unused £15 of tonight’s expense budget, I am going to be good and force myself to rewrite that ill-fated article for La Brita Esperantisto which has been hanging over my head for far too long now…