The Liar

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I first read this book when I was coming out, and I fell in love with it. It spoke to me – not so much the international intrigue bits that the story culminates in, but rather the sections about Adrian’s exploits at school and exploration of his sexuality in the novel’s first half. Wodehouse could not have written this, however. Not enough fun, and too much sex. Including all sorts of odd couplings, some of which are uncomfortable to think about. A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

Szabó is " Helen", the catalyst of the Trojan War (pronounced / ˈ ʒ ɑː b oʊ/ rather than [ˈsɒboː] on the audiobook) There are couplings, games, journeys, eye-wincing injuries, Roundheads, spaniels, beets and roots before the witty gathering where the secret is revealed and the reader left aghast. Adrian joins Trefusis in a forced sabbatical, which they claim to spend studying the fricative shift in English. In actuality, the year is spent in a game of espionage in which they must acquire the parts for Mendax (from the Latin adjective meaning "lying, deceptive"), a lie-inhibiting device from his Hungarian friend Szabó. The story is told from the point of view of Ted Wallace. He was once a promising poet but hasn’t written anything in years and is now old, cynical and grumpy. He drinks a lot. He also sounds exactly like Stephen Fry. As I read his words I just couldn’t help hearing Stephen Fry in my head. The other characters have their own distinct ‘voices’ too. I suppose if you don’t like Stephen Fry this might get irritating but I found it made me feel very sympathetic towards cantankerous Ted, despite his faults. I think that The Hippopotamus wasn't the best first choice. And while I didn't enjoy it so much, I still want to read some other book by Fry in the future. Maybe Making History would be a good option. When I'd read it, I will let you all to know if it was so.

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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. Stephen Fry ranks among my favourite persons on earth. There's something about his terribly English combination of wit, erudition and a dirty mind that never fails to delight me, and it shines brightly in The Liar, the first of the four novels he has published so far. An irreverent and intelligent take on such British institutions as the public-school novel, the Cambridge novel and the spy novel, it is best appreciated by people who have an affinity for such things, but really, anyone with a taste for British humour should enjoy it. It's basically a late-twentieth-century P.G. Wodehouse update with some smut thrown in for good measure, and if that doesn't appeal to you, you're not a proper Anglophile. I really had no idea what to expect from this book. I had never read any of Fry's work before. I randomly grabbed it from the shelf. I was pleasantly surprised, but then again, I have a fondness for dry British humour. Adrian also brings out our darker side. His semi-sociopathic ability - eagerness even - to lie, outright lie, when nothing is gained; this is something we can also relate to, whether we like it or not. Adrian - or perhaps Fry - exposes us as sad, pathetic people who feel, know, that they simply aren't as interesting as they'd like to be. His habitual lying revolves around himself and his experiences; he says what he wants people to know, and how he wants them to think of him. And we've all done the same. How many new-age college girls are spontaneously lesbian, vegetarian whale-lovers after their 18th birthday? Much more than actually /are/ lesbian, vegetarian, or whale-lovers for their lives, but it's something to /say/. It's a distraction from the fact that they, like so many others, are white, middle-class American girls who go home to the family they said was dead for Christmas and are at the college on a sports scholarship for lacrosse. Ho-hum. You wouldn't date a girl like that. I wasn't sure what to make of this to begin with, but I found it increasingly brilliant as I went along.

Ik lees Het Nijlpaard van Stephen Fry. IN VERTALING. De omvang van deze ramp dringt slechts langzaamaan tot mij door. Het betekent dat ik nooit, NOOIT meer deze orgie van schuttingtaal, grotesk cynisme en platte seks, deze in vitriool, drijfmest en tien jaar oude whisky gedrenkte bladzijden voor de volle 100% zal kunnen smaken in de oorspronkelijke taal. Ik moet onmiddellijk stoppen met lezen tot ik een Engelse versie heb. MAAR IK KAN NIET STOPPEN! Adrian is later expelled from school for writing an article discussing the tradition of hidden behaviours that could be considered homosexual at public schools; consequently, he takes his A-level examinations in a Gloucestershire state school. Adrian claims to have run away from home due to unhappiness, subsequently becoming a rent boy, but it is later revealed, in an overheard conversation, that this probably never occurred. 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. What it helped me while I was reading this novel, was that I knew to understand the Laurie's style of commenting controvertial topics that while Fry's way isn't done is such effective same form than Laurie's, it did help me to understand that in several moments, you don't have to take him so seriously and so by-the-letter, since many comments are sarcastic and purposely out of tone.am I so different from anyone else?…Doesn’t everyone just rearrange patterns? Ideas can’t be created or destroyed, surely.’

After graduation, Adrian attends a farcical meeting where he and other attendees discuss the arrest of Trefusis, who was arrested on charges of cottaging, sabotaging the footage of an onlooking BBC film crew. It is later revealed that he was actually undertaking a document exchange preceded by two kisses on the cheek as is custom in several European countries, such as Hungary. I found the writing style easy to read and the story entertaining. It was funny in some places, poignant in others. I particularly enjoyed the histories of the characters and the relationships between them. Each chapter weaves together a series of lies and truths which leave the reader guessing what is true and what is orchestrated until the pieces are slowly pulled loose. Are Adrian’s tastes really so catholic? Who murdered the Hungarian violinist? (And why was Adrian a witness?) What disentangles is a plot ripe with murder, intrigue, rivalry—all manhandled by a pot of unreliable narrators. He spends too much of the book flexing his encyclopaedic knowledge to no point at all, which is great in the context of a show like QI, but when it’s interspersed with a story you’re struggling to engage with, the result feels like trying to watch a pirated film in the mid-2000’s while constantly swatting away unsolicited pop-up ads.Stephen Fry is a phenomenon: writer, actor, comedian, director, librettist, quiz show host and award ceremony compare, there seems to be no end to his ability to excel at whatever he chooses to do. The Liar" has one weakness and that is the spy / espionage subplot that Fry inserts in brief chapters between the longer chapters that depict the linear narrative of the story. They are set off by italics until the subplot and main plot connect up, and I thought that it was a detraction from the text, weakened it almost like Fry did not trust the characters he had created on their own merits, but rather had to make them interesting by inserting them into a spy thriller novel. It was not necessary in my opinion. Lastly is Adrian’s time spent as a spy during Trefusis’s fake sabbatical to study the fricative shift in the English language. Told first as interspersed espionage bits in italics by a third-person omniscient narrator, the unidentified spy characters refer to each other in code names from the story of Helen of Troy, we are then in later chapters immersed in the intrigue. Many will find their banter delightfully comical; others will find them long-winded, as it’s clear they enjoy hearing themselves talk: Yes!’ Trefusis clapped his hands with delight. ‘You are a liar. Yes, yes yes! But who else knows that they are doing that and nothing else? You know, you have always known. That is why you are a liar. Others try their best, when they speak they mean it. You never mean it.’ 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: