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. 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.

Fry makes a big show of asking--and pointedly not answering--big questions about artifice and authenticity in society and human behavior...but guards himself always with the insinuation that he is only asking--and not answering--as a joke. 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. 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.

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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. 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.

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. 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.’ Weird, but compelling, because the main character, poet Edward Lennox Wallace (Tedward), is a cantankerous, misogynistic, drunken snob who becomes the unlikely investigator of a country house mystery. The bar on level 3 of the University of Dundee Student Union building is named after the book, as Fry was Rector of the university from 1992 to 1998.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.