Stephen Fry is known for being many things: Comic, actor, philanthropist, poet, latent homosexual and author. His gift for words, whether spoken or written, has always been a particular joy to me. However, not many seem to have discovered the joy of reading one of Mr. Fry's novels. His autobiographies have garnered a fair amount of attention but his fiction has been overshadowed by his other works. I , myself, am a very keen fan of the t.v. show "A Bit of Fry and Laurie."
After discovering that Fry had written a portion of fiction literature in the 90's I was absolutely hell bent on finding it and absorbing it as quickly as possible, even if that meant evolving my eyes to perform some sort of ocular osmosis. I decided to start from the beginning and began searching for his first novel which he wrote in 1993 entitled "The Liar." Fortunately there was a singular copy for me to purchase at the local Barnes and Noble which was unsurprising given his somewhat limited appeal in the U.S.
Before I dive into the formal review I must first remark on the cover. The aesthetics of a book's design are usually of small to no importance when judging the work as a whole, but this particular design was a special assault unto the eyes. It appeared as though the whole thing had been assembled by a 15 year old in the Windows program 'Paint' in less than 30 minutes. The background is a flat burgundy marble texture which covers the whole front and is then adorned or rather plastered with 4 pictures of the sculptured bust of King David in each corner. Each picture is made to look as though it's been scribbled on with crayon in a hoolaginstic fashion, like it has to do with the content of the book in some way. Finally the title is plastered rather dully right in the middle of the cover in some silly cursive font. It truly is the worst cover I've ever seen on a book. Were I browsing casually I would never have bought it for it's intriguing design.
The books focus orbits around the experiences of it's protagonist Adrian Healey. Healey is a young prep-school student who also happens to be gay and who also happens to bear a great resemblance to "The Catcher in the Rye's" Holden Caulfield. It's not a striking resemblance or a rip off but more of a tip of the cap to the iconic character. It's fair to say that any adolescent male in modern literature is going to bear some marked resemblance to Holden because he so fully embodied the angst that many of us felt at that age. Fry appears to be pulling from his own experiences early on in life for this character which is not to be unexpected, this being his first novel. Healey is intelligent. Very intelligent. He posses a prowess for the spoken word and the English language which exceeds his age and indeed the age of many of his superiors. Here is where Fry allows himself room to soar. His wit and humor are thick through the pages of Adrian's interactions with his fellow classmates. Indeed it is one of the funniest books I have ever read. Fry swings from the brilliantly clever to the surprisingly brash with ease as he manages to capture the crassness of a teenage boy and the unwieldy way in which he assigns his intelligence to social situations. A subplot of the book contains the sordid crush that Adrian possess for another of his classmates, Hugo Cartwright. Even today it feels fresh and exciting to read this kind of topic on the page. Perhaps that's because I'm American and I've been kept from it far longer than the rest of Europe. I like to think that maybe Fry was writing in this way as some sort of vicarious recompense for his hero Oscar Wilde, who was never able to write about such things even though they were such a large part of his life.
Fortunately Fry's verbosity never weakens the books pace nor inhibits the development of his characters. His tone is already as self-assured and matured as a seasoned author. But it feels clear from the very beginning that he is attempting to weave a thicker plot by means other than exploiting the social traipsing of his central character. I don't want to spoil or allude to heavily to specific plot points but it does become clear from the beginning of the book that the subject matter is quite serious. There is an undercurrent of severity that marks most pages. The story see-saws back and forth between a boy coming of age and an international espionage. I will say that I was confused about some of the locations we read about in the book, there didn't seem to be much description about the settings. Also Fry had a tendency to jump back and forth in time with only the barest of hints, and though I managed to keep up with these sudden lurches, it would take a bit of time for me to realize that we were no longer in the same place or time. I honestly believe some simple formatting could have been done to ease this as it seemed to serve no narrative purpose.
Lastly I feel as though the ending was terribly rushed. Either it was rushed or haphazardly put together because it came off as improbable and far too fantastic. The book did have a slight Absurdist tone throughout but the exclamation point at the end felt like the wrong punctuation to end this book on. Couple that ending with the aforementioned formatting snafu and it become a little hairy.
Overall I felt satisfied after reading this book. It was outstanding for a freshman entry and difficult to put down. If your looking for something incredibly humorous with fantastic range and characters, then I highly recommend this book.
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