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Sebastian Faulks’s huge popularity has been built on novels such as Birdsong and Charlotte Gray in which imaginary individuals are caught up in large historical events. Those not seduced by these often skilfully realised narratives complain that some of the devices Faulks uses are a little obvious and that some of the writing is a little flat. His last novel, Human Traces, although set once more in the past, was regarded as a departure, digging rather deeper into the human psyche as two psychiatrists investigated the causes of schizophrenia and psychosis.

Faulks’s new novel is heralded as “unlike anything he has written before”, but again it deals with mental illness. It opens at Cambridge in the 1970s where Faulks’s narrator, Mike Engleby, is an undergraduate. The first three chapters shuttle between his life at university, his deprived childhood in working-class Reading, and his experiences as a scholarship boy at a grim public school. Then, as Engleby puts it, “something truly terrible” happens: Jennifer Arkland, a fellow undergraduate to whom Engleby is attracted, disappears.

It is no surprise to the reader when the police question Engleby, and this is a shame because the novel might have been more compelling if our narrator’s disturbed personality had not been so obvious from the offset. Engleby is not, however, charged, and subsequently becomes a journalist, a job he manages to hold down with considerable success because, although bonkers (his own word), he is also clever and has strong opinions.

The novel is revealed as “a sort of journal” that Engleby has kept “on and off” and brings up to date when fate finally catches up with him. By choosing a narrator who is not merely unreliable in the literary sense but actually suffering from “dissociation”, Faulks has set himself a technical problem that he doesn’t entirely resolve. In order to bring a more objective light to bear on his narrator’s behaviour, he rather crudely arranges for Engleby to read and reproduce not only a long police statement made by an old acquaintance, but also a complicated psychiatric report on himself. Engleby can do this (and memorise great chunks of Jennifer’s stultifying diary) because his memory is “of an almost ‘savant’ or autistic order”.

As a panellist on Radio 4’s The Write Stuff, Faulks is expected to produce literary parodies to order, and while the novel includes some mildly entertaining cameos from the likes of Jeffrey Archer, too much of it – ritual abuse at public school; Oxbridge murder mystery – seems merely hand-me-down. Matters improve once Engleby is incarcerated and amuses himself keeping one step ahead of the psychiatrists. But this seems rather too late for a novel that, although never less than intelligent, has hitherto been oddly unengaging.

Engleby by Sebastian Faulks

Hutchinson £17.99 pp342

Available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £16.19 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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