The Liar by Stephen Fry Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Liar
Book Review: Still funny
Summary: 4 Stars
Not much to add to the previous reviews; this is a flawed novel but it is bursting with all the jokes, one-liners and set-piece scenes you could ask for. I first read it ten years ago, and it always rewards a revisit. But for all you moaning American readers who can't bear its Englishness: do you only want to read books set in America? Is the writing really so impenetrable that the meaning is lost? Do we all have to move to New York before appreciating The Godfather? Or to nineteenth century Russia to read Tolstoy? I went to a state school in London in the 1980s, which is as far away from the 1970s country boarding school of the book as the Moon is from Mars. I still laughed at the jokes. Come on you guys - do yourselves a favour, broaden your minds.Book Review: Thankyou.
Summary: 5 Stars
Thankyou, Stephan Fry. Every day I read and read and read. Rarely do I laugh and cry and think so much as I have today. Why? Today I read The Liar.Book Review: This books leaves you dazed and amused.
Summary: 5 Stars
This books leaves you dazed and amused. That doesn't say it's a good book. In fact, it isn't. It's a fake throughout. It just leaves you as dazed as you would be if you discovered a good friend has been telling you lies all along, and as amused as one feels after having been played a practical joke.The books' content is a (good, clever, superb, funny, whatever) assemblage of stereotypes and cliches found in (homoerotic) childhood novels (e.g. Gide's Counterfeiters, Julien Green's L'autre Sommeil, Cocteau's Enfants terribles - Fry further "credits" JD Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird). There is no single original ('true') feeling or insight expressed in the book itself - whenever it goes emotional, works of literature are quoted. The author does 'outside' what his fictional character Adrian does inside: cheat and copy, and by reading the appraisals here and on the cover, just as him it seems he's getting away with it.
Now the author tells you on the first page that no word of the following is true. So he has his own 'Liar's Paradox' here, forcing even critics that recognize the book a deceit to admit that it contains some truth. In fact, the book hardly disguises it's a joke, with its absurd spy story frame. My guess is that the author, in the beginning, set himself a spy story outline (with T-shirts and jackets as protagonists), and devoted himself to filling these blanks by characters developed from the sheer impossible other end of a pseudo-autobiographical homoerotic childhood and campus novel. The lingering suspicion that the whole book is an intentional fraud or joke (just look at the dedication line) became conviction when getting to the German conversations in the last slippery slope of events (liars letting liars tell the truth in order to support a lie). The German used here by the philological genius Trefusis quite surprisingly contains wrong grammar and wrong choice of words. That's unlikely accidental. I mean, if one does a debut novel and includes foreign languages, it seems one would turn to some native speaker for possible corrections - that is unless one does in fact want it only to convince the quick reader. Under a scrutinizing eye the book is as 'original' as is the hero Adrian's mock-Dickens "Peter Flowerbuck".
Since it is so obvious the author tries to be discovered the same kind of fraud his hero is, one wonders whether the (then truly 'autobiographical') book hasn't some morals after all. With all the displayed wit, humour, mastery of language, the author seems to say: "See, I could have sold you some enjoyable read without you even knowing everything is second hand - the other bestselling authors do it all the time. I just tell you." That's a liar's morals. The title seems apropriate then (maybe it's even meant to read as part of the author's name, as in "Stephen Fry the Liar"), and since not only this idea is original but also its execution superb, I suppose the book has a well deserved place in literature's monstrosities cabinet.
Book Review: Unpredictable romp
Summary: 4 Stars
Fry's first novel is a more-than-promising debut, a novel of magnificent flights-of-fanciful wordplay within a complex structure of shifting time and points-of-view. It's not perfect, by all means, but it more than makes up for its little faux pas with the sheer audacity of its style and scope. The book centers around the life of one Adrian Healey, a boy-man who is an incontrovertible prevaricator. We meet Adrian at English public school, and instantly we are charmed. While he is no role-model, his is the type of quick wit that most of us would like to have. And since the point-of-view is Adrian's, we also come to understand some of the seedier aspects of his soul. The delivery is similar to Tom Brown's Schooldays or the "boy's school" novels that Wodehouse wrote before he started righting the record of valets and aunts.To this plebeian plot Fry overlays a post-Cold War bit of skullduggery, full of code names and mysterious packages, sudden deaths and people described simply by the type of clothing they are wearing. There is a definite link between the two plots from the beginning, but the ties that bind are less than apparent. It is in this Fleming/Carre subplot where the novel slacks off a bit, but even when the novel seems to have finally turned a predictable corner, you discover that Fry's quite the sly one. Like a lie repeated over time, everything seems to make sense until it all adds up and doesn't. Let me assure you, you will not be able to predict where this novel is going.
Book Review: Very VERY funny
Summary: 5 Stars
Funny, hilarious, outrageous, filthy, inventive.If you hate laughing out loud in public places, or if offensive language upsets you, then DO NOT buy this book.
Otherwise, buy it without delay...
...probably best not bought as a present for your grandmother!