The Liar

May 3, 1993
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.

July 1, 2003
The British actor's very funny first novel traces the antics of a reckless, irreverent ex-Cambridge student involved in a bizarre espionage caper.

May 1, 1993
In the elite world of upper-class British prep schools and Oxford, Adrian Healey grows up dealing with his homosexuality by acting very queer and telling so many untruths that he almost believes some of them. He's devastated, though, by his yearning for another boy, Hugo Cartwright. Some funny scenarios involving adolescent antics precede Adrian's getting a job teaching in another prep school before he goes off to Oxford and meets Professor Donald Treiffus, a master of linguistics who speaks some 40 languages. Here the plot becomes a bit murky as Adrian and the professor try to recover Mendax, a Hungarian invention that prevents lying, which is, after all, Adrian's Achilles' heel. Murder and mayhem follow, but then we learn there really isn't any Mendax. It's a hoax Treiffus and some other World War II intelligence types concocted to expose Adrian's uncle, who's very high up in British government--and disloyal. Though "The Liar" is marred by some jarring transitions and inconsistencies, its appealing, intelligent humor is refreshing; Truman Capote fans in particular will relish it. ((Reviewed May 1, 1993))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1993, American Library Association.)

April 15, 1993
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 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.