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AS A GENERATION of novelists reaches middle age, the 1970s and 1980s, those long-despised decades in which they grew up, seem to exercise an increasing fascination.

Jonathan Coe led the way, and more recently we have had David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, and even the “modern” parts of William Boyd’s wartime spy thriller Restless, set in 1970s Oxford.

Now Sebastian Faulks, who has achieved his greatest successes in the more distant past – the First World War with Birdsong, the Second with Charlotte Gray, the early years of psychiatry in Human Traces – has turned to his formative years. Indeed, had I been given Engleby without the author’s name on it – with its unreliable narrator, its bullying at a minor public school, its unsolved mysteries – I would have put my money on Boyd as the author, although the final third could be Ian McEwan. The story follows its narrator, Mike Engleby, from school, via “an ancient university” (Cambridge, although it is never named) to a career in journalism and beyond.

As that is exactly Faulks’s career trajectory, it is tempting to look for parallels with real life. But if Mike, liar, self-possessed, arrogant loner, thief and serial abuser of drugs and alcohol, has any correlation with his creator, it is only as Mr Hyde to the author’s Dr Jekyll. Mike, we soon realise speaks with a forked, not a Faulksed, tongue.

The story opens as he develops an obsession with a fellow student, Jen. They know each other, but are they as close as Mike would have us believe? Our doubts increase as Mike steals her diary one night – he doesn’t seem to figure as largely as he ought, being dismissed as “Mike(!)”. Then Jen disappears on her way home from a party and Mike becomes a suspect.

This Cambridge section is beautifully done as Faulks evokes an era through its pop music and pretensions, making some excellent jokes along the way. He is particularly acute in his recognition that the student characters are little more than children playing at being grown-ups.

But, as Mike drifts into journalism, the novel rather loses its way, although the plot certainly requires some distance of time between its opening and the end. Faulks has some good sport with hind-sight at 1980s politics; at one point his only friend from college predicts to a disbelieving Mike the end of the Cold War and apartheid – but his greatest incredulity is reserved for a forecast of postfeminism (“there’ll be a boom in lacy underwear . . . they’ll call their own films ‘chick-pics’ ”).

There are good vignettes as Mike meets Jeffrey Archer, Ken Livingstone, the founders of The Independent (Mike declines the job, where Sebastian accepted), even Mrs Thatcher, but I couldn’t help feeling that this was what journalists call “clearing out their notebooks”; that Faulks had kept the encounters as “good material for a novel” and was finally finding them a home.

The novel changes dramatically in its final section, as Jen’s body is finally discovered. It becomes clear, in the dissection of Mike’s disintegrating mental state, that this novel is a logical follow-up to Human Traces. Faulks allows Mike to give us a rereading of all that has gone before. This is technically brilliant but slightly reinforces the feeling of a novel too in love with its own cleverness; earlier, when Jen disappears, Mike reads press reports full of elementary errors, and the author cannot resist letting him point them all out, in case we miss the point.

The cover describes Engleby as a “lament for a generation that failed its country”. True, Faulks sees little to celebrate in the past 25 years or in his characters’ careers in the media or making money, but this does not really work as a meditation on misplaced media influence. Better to read it as a portrait of one mind out of joint with its times, and eventually defeated by them. That way, witty, poignant, Engleby is as cold as a Fenland wind, as clever as a Cambridge don.

Hutchinson, £17.99; 342pp £16.19 (free p&p) 0870 1608080 timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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