The Liar

Adrian Healey loves to lie. He lies all the time. Every minute, every moment. Worse, he does it wonderfully, imaginatively, brilliantly. He lies to buck the System, to express his contempt for convention, but mostly because he just plain likes to. It's fun, and so much more challenging. It is high camp. One creates when one prevaricates. "Doesn't everyone think the way I think?" says Adrian of his various inventions. Like the pornographic novel by Charles Dickens, his career as a Piccadilly "rent-boy" hireable by the hour, his stressful work as a drug "mule" smuggling illegal substances.
He has (as his Cambridge tutor observed) "a fine brain, but a dreadful mind." Already in his public school career, marked by privilege and pederasty, he had lost the ability to differentiate between simple truth and his elaborate fictions.
The Liar is as wicked and witty, as unspeakably (and unquotably) funny as its protagonist narrator - and as irresistible as its multi-talented author, Stephen Fry. Mr. Fry's credits grow daily. He is the star of a film entitled Peter's Friends, and of Masterpiece Theater's television series Jeeves and Wooster. He is half of the Fry and Laurie comedy team, he has written a play called Latin and the book for the musical Me and My Girl, and he is a weekly columnist for the London Daily Telgraph. He is also now the author of the #1 English bestseller, The Liar, which spent several months at the very top position on the British charts. In the literary firmament it has been identified as somewhere between Oscar Wilde and Saki.

Fry is a British polymath--actor, journalist, playwright--who is currently on view here as the eponymous hero of the Kenneth Branagh movie Peter's Friends . This book, his first novel, was a huge critical and popular success in Britain in both cloth and paperback, and it is surprising that the book has taken almost two years to make its way across the Atlantic. Perhaps part of the reason is its obsession with such arcanely British things as public school life, Cambridge academia and cricket. But it is coruscatingly funny, often quite shocking and profoundly irreverent. Its hero is Adrian Healey, who assumes a wildly gay persona (and is one of the few Wilde imitators who can verbally live up to the original) but whose besetting problem is a lack of contact with reality. Everything he does and says is a sly concoction, from his outre behavior at school and college to his period as a male prostitute ("rent-boy") in London to his schoolteaching days and his eventual involvement, with his college tutor, in a bizarre espionage caper involving a Hungarian "truth machine." The plot is in fact deliberately confusing and quite inconsequential. The book is enjoyable for its verbal dexterity, its often filthy but usually hilarious jokes and its reckless high spirits. Some readers may flinch from its callousness; many more will find themselves helpless with laughter.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Comic actor/screenwriter Fry (the TV series A Bit of Fry and Laurie, etc.) weighs in with a fulsomely naughty first novel about a lascivious, blandly prevaricating English schoolboy cast adrift at public school, on the streets, at Cambridge, and in MI5. Adrian Healey--his chances in life already dented by his months as a London prostitute and his cocaine arrest--arrives at Cambridge with a reputation for insatiable sexual appetites (``Love was Adrian's guilty secret, sex his public pride'') and a strong aversion to telling the truth. Challenged by Donald Trefusis, the Senior Tutor who catches him in plagiarism, to produce some kind--any kind--of original work, Adrian takes a breather from his romantic pursuit of Hugo Cartwright (whom he's already had briefly in a lav before he realized that this was True Love) to penetrate the college's extensive collection of Victorian pornography and ``discover'' three chapters of Peter Flowerbuck, Dickens's lost pornographic masterpiece--which only Donald, of all the luminaries in the college, recognizes as Adrian's own work. Meantime, italicized interchapters have already suggested that (a) largely as a result of such high jinks, Donald will end up inveigling Adrian into an elaborate and dangerous spy plot to take delivery of Mendax, a device that prevents the user from lying, and (b) espionage … l`anglaise is just as foppish and foolish as the groves of academe, which so often furnish its personae. The treatment throughout is manic, in-your-face, and taboo-busting in the tradition of Orton, Monty Python, and numberless graffiti artists. Chockablock with witless pranks, single-entendres, lesser dolts like Pigs Trotter and Dr. Humphrey Biffen, and allusions to Shakespeare, Saki, Wilde, and George Herbert. Too British in its calculated outrageousness to repeat its bestselling performance on this side of the Atlantic, but still dizzyingly, peerlessly sophomoric. (Film rights to Paramount) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

British comedian and actor Fry (currently appearing in Kenneth Branagh's Peter's Friends ) has written a witty first novel about the adventures of Adrian Healey, a British schoolboy and "the liar" of the title. Adrian is an amusing, if appalling, character, and readers will enjoy following him as he develops from a lovesick teenager wih a "pash" on fellow student Hugo Cartwright to a Cambridge undergraduate involved in international espionage. There are interludes along the way involving, among other things, sex, suicide, Piccadilly rent-boys, and a "lost" pornographic novel by Charles Dickens. This is a clever and entertaining novel that will appeal to Anglophiles with a twisted sense of humor. Recommended for public libraries.
- Elizabeth Mellett, Brookline P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.