The Liar

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I wasn't sure what to make of this to begin with, but I found it increasingly brilliant as I went along. It's a shame, really, because the plot is fairly decent, and Fry raises some interesting questions about faith, but the writing is really unpardonably sloppy. Indeed, so adept is he at so many things that Clive Anderson has even suggested that Fry would be able to turn his hand to football management. One can have no doubt that he would succeed. Stephen Fry is the epitome of the Renaissance Man and is fast becoming what we in Britain like to describe as a ‘national treasure.’ Possessed with a brilliant mind, a natural wit and an extraordinary verbal facility, Fry can never be ignored; he demands to be listened to, read and admired. I shot off to bed early. Cheryl Chest was beating her terrible tattoo and I needed my pills and the soft snog of Sandra Sleep.

The novel has a cynical and ironic tone which only a British novel can have, but it ultimately also has a heart. And despite the fact that the novel is twenty years old, it doesn’t feel dated. The sign of a good read, surely, is also that the reader immediately wants to read something else by the author, and this is exactly how I feel right now. As much as I enjoy (nay, love) reading, however, I would prefer an audio-version again when it comes to Stephen Fry’s writing; his reading aloud is simply priceless. Iain Smith, who has worked on films including Mad Max: Fury Road, is executive producing the project alongside Gavin James ( Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines), for A-Z Films.So, what actually is the game? Is Fry aiming for a certain effect, or is this just a lazily tossed-off first novel which fails to hang together only because its author failed to care? Taken individually, I found all the chapters to be at least reasonably entertaining. There aren't too many other novels that I would think of in terms of which chapter was my favorite (it's Chapter Six—I highly recommend it and suspect it would remain quite enjoyable if you read it alone and gave the rest of the book a miss). Taken as a whole, the book fails miserably to cohere into any meaningful narrative.

am I so different from anyone else?…Doesn’t everyone just rearrange patterns? Ideas can’t be created or destroyed, surely.’ In this novel, as in everything else he touches, Stephen Fry alternately entertains, amuses, provokes and alarms, and I found the novel to be part silly, part thought-provoking, part brilliant.

Stephen Fry is one of the most brilliant individuals of the current time. To find that he excels in literature as well should be no surprise. It is just possible that this is the point: that a life which is the product of lies will inevitably be, on the whole, unsatisfactory, no matter how charming and diverting it may seem at any given moment. That the expert liar's power, derived by manipulation of others' perception, is bought through surrendering the ability to form real human relationships. It is also possible that I was desperate to read some meaning into a hopelessly shallow text. If you think that there is a discrepancy between giving a book 3 stars and placing it on the "disappointing" shelf, remember that the author is Stephen Fry, someone I think of as being awesomely smart and very funny. His intelligence is evident in this book, but much of the attempted humor falls flat. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that much of it is the kind of humor that might have flown a generation ago (think Kingsley Amis, Wilt Sharpe, Roald Dahl), but is completely jarring in 2010. What puzzles me is that it would have been equally jarring in 1994, when this book was published, and Fry is smart enough to know this, so it's obviously a conscious choice that he made. It's unclear why he did so, because it detracts quite a bit from the enjoyment of the book. It's a toss-up which was more offputting - the incessant vulgar misogynistic musings of the splenetic, Kingsley Amis wannabe narrator or the paragraphs of ridiculously mincing poofter-talk inflicted on the reader. There is really no excuse for this:

He attended Queen’s College Cambridge from 1979, joining the Cambridge Footlights Dramatic Club where he met Hugh Laurie, with whom he forged a highly successful writing partnership. His first play, Latin! or Tobacco and Boys, written for Footlights, won a Fringe First at Edinburgh Festival in 1980. He wrote again for theatre in 1984 when he rewrote Noel Gay’s musical Me and My Girl (1990). This was nominated for a Tony Award in 1987. He has written for television and screen, and as a newspaper columnist – for the Literary Review, Daily Telegraph and The Listener.Fry's dapper treatment of the English language is certainly the most enjoyable part of this light-hearted fiction filled with juvenile but clever and high-brow but stinging jokes and fables, and this delight is only heightened when the book is listened to narrated by the author himself (audiobook available on Audible, for example). The constant jumps between three different periods in the protagonist's life can, however, make the story strenuous to follow and, frankly, fail (at times) to keep up the suspense and/or mystery that the author probably intended for these jumps to convey. Stephen Fry's five novels are The Liar (1991), The Hippopotamus (1994), Making History (1996), The Stars' Tennis Balls (2000) and Revenge: A Novel (2003). He has also published a collection of work entitled Paperweight (1992); and Rescuing the Spectacled Bear: A Peruvian Journey (2002) – his diary of the making of a documentary on the plight of the spectacled bears of Peru. His book Stephen Fry in America was published in 2008. After losing his job at newspaper, Tedward's goddaughter engages him to spy on the family of Tedward's old army friend in Norfolk. Initially, there does not seem to be anything worth reporting to his goddaughter but as the story develops, Tedward becomes close to his godson who seems to be a bit of outcast and who also seems to be at the centre of some mysterious events. We follow Ted Wallace, a 60-something has-been journalist-cum-poet, who is outwardly and verbally a cynical misogynist. He travels to a country house in an attempt to unravel some rather strange goings-on in a family and finds a bit more than he bargained for. He goes there because he is the godfather of a son of said family, though he had practically forgotten this fact, and because he has to help out a niece of said family, who is his goddaughter, which he had also more or less forgotten. You get the picture. I didn’t really like any of the characters for a long time, but that wasn’t necessary to enjoy the novel nor, I suppose, was I meant to. The reader’s feeling towards the narrator, Ted, change, however, and I enjoyed how this was done – the tone and story balancing strangely between sentimentality and cynicism. The moral, if there is one, is that it's okay to live life in any way you want to, so long as you remember there isn't anyone to save you or fix you but yourself.