The houseguest from hell

Once upon a time, an untrustworthy story- teller seemed rather an enterprising creation — and some great books were written this way, like Lolita and The Good Soldier (from which Blake Morrison takes an epigraph). But nowadays having a fibber as compère seems painfully predictable. Only if our dodgy raconteur is strikingly engaging or funny do we, as readers, feel inclined to stay the course, to have it confirmed that our guide is actually a fraud, or killer, and his life a hollow sham.

The trick can still be pulled off. John Lanchester did it in The Debt to Pleasure, and Sebastian Faulks in Engleby, a book made interesting by the way it seems to be Faulks’s nightmare about how wrong everything could have gone for him in another life. Engleby is also well managed, the clues to the hero’s lunacy eked out carefully, so that the reader remains in some suspense, or at least uncertainty, for much of the book.