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The Liar

3.68 of 5 stars 3.68 · rating details · 5,520 ratings · 337 reviews

Stephen Fry's breathtakingly outrageous debut novel, by turns eccentric, shocking, brilliantly comic and achingly romantic.
Adrian Healey is magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life; unprepared too for the afternoon in Salzburg when he will witness the savage murder of a Hungarian violinist; unprepared to learn about the Mendax device; unprepared for more mu...more

Paperback, 384 pages

Published August 4th 1997 by Arrow (first published 1991)

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Sep 04, 2008 Martine rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Anglophiles and lovers of British humour

Shelves: british, favourites, glbt, humour, modern-fiction

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 tas...more

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Sep 11, 2007 Allison rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Love love love Stephen Fry but this one was a little hard to follow. I think I got 90% of the story but there were some very confusing bits. Even so, his writing is wonderful.

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Sep 01, 2008 Trevor rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: humour, literature

I need to start by saying that I think this man is a God, which does seem to be the standard opening play in any discussion of Stephen Fry by at least one person in the room. If, in this case, that person needs to be me, well, so be it. This is his first novel and although there were parts of it that had me making the kind of snorting sounds that could all too easily have had people thinking I was suffering from a terribly debilitating illness – mostly I don’t think it worked. It pains me to say...more

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Aug 19, 2010 E rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels, favorites

Loved, loved, loved it! And I can see where others wouldn't.

The dialogue reads like white-water rafting. The story-telling tantalizes and satisfies like the tongue-in-cheek sex scenes (no pun intended?) that work themselves onto every third page. And the hero, Adrian, should be the sort of character I detest, the kind that ruins the whole book for me. But the near perfect collage that are his lies and truths, his desires and apathies, yanks at every sense until "smitten" sounds too gentle a desc...more

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Apr 15, 2013 Kim rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: stephen-fry, the-liar, comedy, cambridge, witty

I wasn't sure what to make of The Liar by Stephen Fry at first and became a little confused as the story jumped backwards and forwards through time, but, it didn't take me long to be completely absorbed in this wonderfully witty and amusing tale of people who keep secrets and tell lies.

Adrian Healey is the central character in this story and he is witty, bright, intellectual, snobbish and quite daring. The first time we meet Adrian it is clear he is not like other boys at his school:

"Adrian che...more

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Sep 24, 2012 Martin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: comedy, literary, fiction, satire

Perhaps Stephen Fry, who wrote this novel 'The Liar', has unknowingly added a new literary genre that could be called wishful autobiography. Knowing a little bit about the author's background creates a very different experience with this book than if taken just at face value. We have here a novel describing the exploits and dandy adventures of a young English Oscar Wilde-incarnated prep school boy. Adrian, a persuasive and very intelligent student can not tell the truth, not even under great dur...more Perhaps Stephen Fry, who wrote this novel 'The Liar', has unknowingly added a new literary genre that could be called wishful autobiography. Knowing a little bit about the author's background creates a very different experience with this book than if taken just at face value. We have here a novel describing the exploits and dandy adventures of a young English Oscar Wilde-incarnated prep school boy. Adrian, a persuasive and very intelligent student can not tell the truth, not even under great duress or pressure. This talent or perhaps handicap creates an assortment of entertaining situations in the school he attends and gets him into of course a lot of trouble, although not as much as you might expect. Then again he is a skillful liar and we're told the entire book is a lie. The Liar takes place in an environment most of us can't quite relate to. The halls of the privileged public schools of England have their own jargon, history and common understanding. It takes quite a bit of that knowledge to understand certain passages of the novel even though Fry takes care to explain. Throughout the work this internal language generates a distance where as a reader you get the sensation that you're always just missing the point. For example, you have to be quite well read to get some of the finer points of the interaction between Adrian and his chums. Frequently names of characters in Roman literature are used as stereotypes, which, works well, if you've read works like the Satyricon for example.

We can clearly hear Wilde's language and ideas combined with the events Evelyn Waugh might have conjured. At the same time Stephen Fry takes the piss out of the entire genre as well. He clearly shows the self absorbed narrow world of English private academia. However, this isn't just a pastiche novel, it isn't a copy or weak derivative. Through the familiar Victorian and Edwardian language we can clearly here Fry's own voice and one as clever as you might expect. In some parts and phrases we can even hear Chuck Palahniuk's voice.

It is rather strange however to see the means by which Fry evangelizes the gay persuasion. I don't mean that he tries to persuade anyone in converting but there is a definite sense of trying to normalize queerness (his word not mine). The way in which this is done in my view anyway is rather counterproductive. Instead of showing the elegance, the refined nature of most gay men, Fry shows and describes all those things we think they're up to in great detail. After having read Portnoy's Complaint it did not bother me too much but then again I can see how the novel can turn people away.

There is another interesting link to Portnoy's Complaint. Philip Roth who wrote Portnoy has always denied his book was autobiographical. Unlike Fry who I believe clearly admitted in various interviews that the materials for The Liar were snatched from his own experiences in the English public school system and other parts of his early life. Comparing Portnoy to the Liar becomes even more interesting when we look at how the protagonists in either novel address us, the reader. Whereas in Portnoy the author essentially screams at the reader about his problems, Fry hides behind his protagonist. A protagonist who we are told from the very first sentence will lie to us. The protagonist is arrested for possession of cocaine, but as we find out later that was all a lie. In reality Fry was arrested for possession of cocaine and sent to prison. Bits of knowledge like these add a completely new layer to the novel and a rather interesting one because we now have a novel in which we can ask: what exactly is an unreliable narrator when the narrator speaks of both the protagonist and the author?(less)

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Dec 10, 2011 Ensiform rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Fry is a very funny comic actor, in Blackadder and the TV version of Bertie & Jeeves, among others. This debut novel concerns a young lad at a prep school, who later (or is he lying?) becomes a street prostitute and then, under the tutelage of his supremely arch and worldly mentor at Cambridge, becomes involved in an international espionage drama, which turns out to be not at all what it seems --- more than once.

Although Fry writes some sharp and funny dialogue, this book never really decide...more

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Sep 16, 2011 Jane rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction-other

I wish I could give 3.5 stars on this thing. I suppose it's closer to 4 than 3, but I'd like the option. Honestly, I don't think I could tell you what this book was about. It certainly has a plot, but much of the time I wasn't sure exactly where I was chronologically, geographically, or truth-versus-lie-ally.

I kind of feel like it's not the plot you're supposed to be into here. What I loved were the chuckle out-loud one liners and the loveable characters. I enjoyed Adrian's waffling between trut...more

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Feb 03, 2011 Julia rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: People who aren't afraid of naughty language

Shelves: artsy-and-or-camp, mirth, queer-and-sexuality, steampunk-and-bizarre, to-re-read

After reading the unabridged version, I've decided this is one of my favorite books.
Fry stylistically jumps around in his narrative in order to add the feel of disunion with reality. Adrian, Fry's out-of-touch, flamboyant, attention-seeking miscreant of a protagonist, is one of the most wonderfully amiable and relate-able characters in modern literature, because we don't like to think he is. In one way or another, we're all like Adrian. Estranged, lonely people who just want to be /liked/. Who j...more

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Jan 23, 2011 Magpie Driftwood rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: lgbtq, fiction

Of course I picked this up because I love Stephen Fry's comedy, and I wanted to see how it translated to the printed page. I wouldn't say I was disappointed, but I will say this book was not exactly what I was expecting. I did enjoy the characters, and there were many moments that had me laughing out loud, but the non-sequential narrative and use of some scenes in which characters are not identified by name meant I spent half the book being confused. However, I was entertained enough by the styl...more

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Aug 14, 2010 Natasha rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reading-in-russian, translations

Okay, I am not sure who to rate this one.

I really LIKE Stephen Fry as a person and actor and I find his writing very amusing and pleasant to read. But this story? I do not know. It seemed like in the middle of the book he just switched the plot - from the story of the main character, Adrien, his childhood and adolescence and what he had been up to, his sexuality and adventures with other guys.. to some criminal espionage story. That was weird, and as I am not a big fan of espionage plots, I did...more

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Dec 23, 2012 Ed rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

Stephen Fry should stick to acting. The Liar is a valiant effort, and it is clear Fry is well versed in 'significant' english literary tropes...but this is far from making him a good writer. The construction of the story is as sickeningly 'clever' as the main character but ultimately also just as superficial and empty...and in contrast to the main character also kind of sloppy. Fry uses time-worn devices to confuse, obscure and misdirect--effective for what turns out to be a ha-ha-got-you spy no...more Stephen Fry should stick to acting. The Liar is a valiant effort, and it is clear Fry is well versed in 'significant' english literary tropes...but this is far from making him a good writer. The construction of the story is as sickeningly 'clever' as the main character but ultimately also just as superficial and empty...and in contrast to the main character also kind of sloppy. Fry uses time-worn devices to confuse, obscure and misdirect--effective for what turns out to be a ha-ha-got-you spy novel--but also confuses, obscures and misdirects unintentionally with ostentatious verbiage; stunningly poor segues; and unprepared, inappropriate shifts in the voice of the narrator.

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.

There was one--ONE--passage in which Fry appeared to write with any genuine heart, and this at the very end and in the voice of a nearly forgotten side character who was barely introduced and whose relationship to the main character and relevance to the story was hastily (and unsatisfactorily) justified hundreds of pages prior: Jenny, one of two perfunctory female love interests of the smotheringly homosexual Adrian.

"I don't think you quite believe that women exist. To you they're a kind of difficult boy with surplus flesh in some places and missing flesh in others. I'm not even sure if you ever enjoyed my company, but then I don't know if you ever enjoyed anyone else's either, including your own. I know you hate amateur psychology, but there it is. 'Little girls grow up to be women, little boys grow up to be little boys.' I can't believe that our generation is growing up to fulfil all the ridiculous stereotypes. So I'll become an earth mother and you will loll in front of the television watching cricket and Clint, is that it? Then why the years of education? Why a youth at all? Why read books and try to puzzle things out if it all ends in the same way?"

That's the only thing in the book that spoke to me, and the only reason for the second star above. Unfortunately even this, Jenny's letter, ended up going on and losing its punch, blending itself in ultimately with the rest of the overdone blathering that constitutes The Liar.

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Nov 03, 2011 Craig rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Fry's wit and charm is gleefully infectious –and that's good, because the final stretch of the book leaves one searching for an excuse to put it down. Fry's narrative voice cleverly lies to the audience as frequently as its protagonist lies to those around him –but this cleverness sometimes backfires. The espionage interludes attempt to tie the book to its incongruous conclusion, but each time it feels forced, faked, tacked on to make up for a lack of narrative arc. Fry jumps around with time, w...more

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Jul 01, 2012 Claire rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I marked more passages for their beauty and originality in this book than I expected to. Fry's enjoyment of language is infectious and I found myself smiling on numerous occasions. I think that wit without pretension is a rare quality to find in a work.

The inconsistency in genre kept the novel from being fully enjoyable, especially since the interspersed spy sequences were the least engaging part of the narrative. As conventional as it is, I would have enjoyed just reading Adrian's passage throu...more

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Aug 28, 2009 Rebecca rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Stephen Fry fans

In my reading experience, an author's first novel tends to be a very thinly-veiled fictionalization of their own life, usually including awkward meditations on all the resentments and obsessions of their life up to that point and other things that the outside world was better off not knowing. The parts that do happen to be genuinely created from scratch tend to be campy and flat and usually stick out like a sore thumb from the rest of the novel. The Liar, Stephen Fry's first novel, is no excepti...more In my reading experience, an author's first novel tends to be a very thinly-veiled fictionalization of their own life, usually including awkward meditations on all the resentments and obsessions of their life up to that point and other things that the outside world was better off not knowing. The parts that do happen to be genuinely created from scratch tend to be campy and flat and usually stick out like a sore thumb from the rest of the novel. The Liar, Stephen Fry's first novel, is no exception to this general rule.

This book is 75% Fry's autobiography and 25% international espionage. The plot alternates clumsily between the mundane life of Adrian, a homosexual guy growing up in the 1970s in Britain (where Adrian = Stephen Fry), and the exciting and confusing world of Austrian espionage. Why Austria, you may ask? Beats me. Maybe Fry had recently taken a trip to Austria when he wrote the book, and wanted to include a bunch of obscure street names and German words in his story. I still don't understand this section of the book, but I don't think I'm missing much. I recognize that this section, and the book as a whole, was supposed to be funny, but it left me cold.

In any event, Fry does a good job of telling the autobiographical parts of the book in an engaging way, which probably isn't as easy a task as it sounds. However, the "serious"/made-up portion of the book is too melodramatic, confusing, and irrelevant to the vast majority of the story, so those parts were all really frustrating to sit through. The multiple references to cricket and the descriptions of cricket games could have been cut, too - since cricket had no bearing on the plot, the extended references just seemed like gratuitous fandom on his part (he's a huge cricket fan, apparently). Fry is very good at being funny and writing about human relationships (at least between men - I guess that's to be expected from a gay author), but he's awful at writing about action or mystery in an interesting or compelling - or even comprehensible - way. He's better off sticking to the micro of everyday life rather than large-scale machinations like politics or government or really anything outside of British boarding school life.

The only context in which I'd recommend this book is if you're a huge Stephen Fry fan and you want to learn more about his life or see what he's like as a writer. But it's not really a book that can stand on its own merits.(less)

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Oct 09, 2008 Infinite Playlist rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: form-audiobook

The first half of the book deals with the protagonist's teenage years which are quite bizarre but rather interesting. After that the story turns into some weird crime-murder-something I didn't quite grasp. Also the change happened so quickly that I wondered whether I had skipped some tracks but I hadn't. So first part good, second part bleh.
Apart from that the use of words is wonderful and original, I had to marvel at quite a few sentences.

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Dec 01, 2012 Aron rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I agree with most reviews: Love Fry and that's the only reason this book is worth reading.

I gave it 3 then switched it 2 because

1. Fry is showing off too much - the multiple languages, the obscure academic references, and so on were more than a bit too much. I mean this is QI on steroids
2. If you never went to British public school huge parts of the story are boring & incomprehensible - sorry don't have a clue about cricket
3. The unbelievable personal life story is more believable than the...more

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Feb 09, 2012 Anrie Hoogendoorn rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Anrie by: Fré

Almost gave up at page 116... the first chapter of the novel promises an intelligent international spy thriller. Suffice to say that the book does not deliver on this promise. Instead it meanders through the protagonist's youth, with brief interludes hinting that the spy thriller part of the book might yet arrive. Not quite.

The (auto)biographical part of the book is by turns boring and disturbing. In short bursts, Stephen Fry's extravagant vocabulary and prose style can be entertaining, but it s...more

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Jul 05, 2011 Valerie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Stephen Fry on paper is exactly like Stephen Fry in television and films. The Liar was witty, creative, funny and very "lovie" if you know what I am saying. It's an entertaining book and I enjoyed how there were parts of the book that echoed his early autobiography, Moab is my Washpot (one of my favourite books.)

This book is about a Adrian Healey (a highly eccentric, lying gay man) and follows his life from his younger school days through to his his adult life. It jumps from different part of A...more

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Aug 01, 2011 Steve Mitchell rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Adrian Healy is a chronic liar. You can always tell when he is lying by the simple fact that his lips are moving. We follow Healy’s exploits through private school where toast and buggery are the order of the day culminating in an underground magazine and expulsion. Following this disgrace he finds himself in Piccadilly turning tricks as a rent boy and being caught by the police with enough Bolivian Marching Powder to see him safely incarcerated at Her Majesty’s pleasure for a couple of years. F...more

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Apr 24, 2010 Bournemouth_book_club rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: nobody

Recommended to Bournemouth_book_club by: book club member

Shelves: blue

I read this for my book club. I have yet to hear what the rest of the group feel. This was just my personal experience.

I was expecting more. The plot never seemed to develop in a way I would find pleasing or satisfying. It chopped and turned quite a lot - jumping between time periods, between characters and there was so much dialogue it was often hard to understand who was talking and when.

I was expecting the plot to develop and thicken, and then create a more crashing climax. Instead I felt th...more

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May 24, 2012 Robin rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: page-turner, charismatic, engaging-prose, 3-point-5-stars, fun, unique, slow-start, well-defined-characters, surprisingly-funny

Indulgent and flimsy, with a third act that feels like it come from a completely different book, I still can't bear to dislike this novel. As noted by just about everyone ever, Fry just has a way with words that speaks directly to the soul/the chemical equivalent thereof, and it's hard to dislike his prose.

There are passages of aching beauty, laugh-out-loud wit, and genuine suspense, often within pages of each other. The travails of Fry's semi autobiographical liar are always, always engaging--i...more

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Jan 21, 2013 Amrita rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

without the confusing, distracting and weak espionage strand running through the novel and completing it, this book is a pale shadow of mr.fry's most excellent Moab is my Washpot. Being written in the early nineties, the humour is more like A Bit of Fry and Laurie and doesn't have the warmth of his later work. There are, of course, brilliant brilliant lines and echoes of some of his heroes like Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh etc. I really wish for a straight out book on unrequited public school boy r...more

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Jan 09, 2013 Dougie Morgan rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Fry-lovers, Silliness Seekers

As has been stated previously, I, like many other amenable persons, am curiously endeared by the mewlings and wonderstruck gurglings of the big Frybaby. This would, then, imply that I align myself with those simpering, sycophantic saps who can say nary a slighting word against this most cherished of national treasures; however, I think it best to disassociate myself from this allegiance post-haste. Though the Fry annals may display my eager sprawl prominently, I fear that I must depart from the...more As has been stated previously, I, like many other amenable persons, am curiously endeared by the mewlings and wonderstruck gurglings of the big Frybaby. This would, then, imply that I align myself with those simpering, sycophantic saps who can say nary a slighting word against this most cherished of national treasures; however, I think it best to disassociate myself from this allegiance post-haste. Though the Fry annals may display my eager sprawl prominently, I fear that I must depart from the effusive eulogies of the past and set a course for swarthier shores when it comes to examining his debut novel; for, despite my desperation to find in this book a paradigm of prosaic perfection, I cannot adopt the perennially fallacious stance of this work’s eponymous hero. To be perfectly candid, this is a novel that is – and I’m afraid that there’s simply no other way of putting it – adequate. And sometimes adequacy can be an almost unsavoury thing, smiling politely with the fervour of the local theatre group’s lead actor.

The novel is centred, surprisingly enough, around an inveterate liar named Adrian, a veritable titan of the Oatesian variety, and follows his development as a consummately crafty cretin. We begin with Adrian affecting a flamboyant personality whilst at boarding school, and his mendacity only swells from there. Soon he has been expelled for seditious activities, completed his A-levels at a local college, and advanced to St Matthew’s College, Cambridge. So far, so Fry; having already read his exceptional autobiography, it was almost biliously blatant that the author was writing from youthful experience. However, things progress a little more unevenly from hereon, with Adrian’s considerable ability as a doyen of dishonesty earning him the attention of a Cambridge Spy Ring, of all things.

Whilst the plot may, at first, appear to be a boulder languorously strolling down a bucolic slope, it soon proves more of a balloon; from time-to-time it will drift in the breeze, traversing the slope like an elegantly drunken skier, and when it tumbles over the edge of the cliff it ascends to new heights of sheer bizarreness. A case in point may be found in the beguiling sub-plot concerning Adrian’s efforts to save St Matthew’s English Department from debilitating budget cuts (eerily prescient, what?), which kicks off with his rather charming conceit of conjuring up a fake Dickens story and ‘discovering’ it during a routine perusal of the library. This truth-less tampering resonates throughout the university, resulting in boosts to funding and an eventual student performance of the work, in which Adrian acts alongside his prep school crush (who, incidentally, inspired the pseudo-Dickens following an amorous encounter in a hotel room), and once the show has garnered critical acclaim…well, that’s it. This plot point dissipates as swiftly as Marley’s ghost, warranting little more than a passing mention in a later chapter. Therein lies my main quibble with this particular novel; it has a plethora of palpitatingly pleasing plotlines that are brazenly discarded the moment they have served any sort of oracular purpose. The aforementioned schoolboy crush, who features so heavily in Adrian’s thoughts as he contemplates the effects of his fibs on those around him, disappears abruptly about halfway through the storyline, again being discarded with little fanfare or elucidation. These sudden changes in the narrative have the ramification of enveloping the work in a polychromatic garb that is devilishly disorientating; the tale feels disjointed and heavily contrived, stopping and starting with the intermittency of a Nabokovian automobile, whilst the final quarter of the piece arrives far too swiftly and hurls the book into new nadirs of unbelievable curiousness. Granted, there is some logic in this fracturing, as the potency of lying is portrayed as a disruptive force that can even hold sway over the author’s literary technique; however, it makes for irritatingly distracting reading. Each strand that Fry begins to weave into his tapestry carries so much potential, bearing the peruser along on a veritable tide of soaring locations, compelling characters and snout-snorting witticisms, and it is a damned shame that his spool proves incapable of holding onto it all.

The style of this piece fares a little better than the imaginings that it serves to relate. True, the initial steps taken are a little on the tipsily unbalanced side, given that the first two chapters appropriate the habits and inflections of Wilde and Waugh respectively. That having been said, Fry is swift to strike the salubrious script that bears his hallmarks: intimate, conversational and brimming with one-liners. A fine example lies in one of the espionagic inserts that interject between chapters; “’Oh look, you’re not going to smoke are you?’ Christ! thought the Bennet, Tovey and Steele. Roll on the next Labour government.” With any other writer, this sequence might strike the reader as incongruous or didactic, but with Fry’s avuncular assumption of gentle detachedness it strikes just the right chord to trickle a smile onto the lips. He also uses prolepsis and analepsis to great effect, once again conveying the fragmentary consequences of lying with limpid lucidity. However, one might consider there to be an oversaturation of these latter techniques, and the frequency with which the synecdoche-ridden interruptions occur becomes rather distracting, given its relative irrelevance to the text as a whole until much later on. In light of the extravagantly superfluous plot development to which the fragments relate, perhaps it might have been preferable, in a stylistic sense, to present these two storylines alongside one another rather than intertwine them, as this would have allowed further questions to be raised as to the nature and intent of dishonesty. That having been said, the author’s style remains characteristically entertaining in spite of its occasional lapses into peremptory ostentatiousness, and certainly proves a sturdy pillar to the otherwise lip-tightening plot.

In conclusion, The Liar is an entertaining, if somewhat frustrating novel. Fry treats the topic of disingenuousness with his endearing humour and panache, though his attempts at conveying the desynchronisation that stems from such an activity is infuriatingly distracting, as it desynchronises the reader in the process. However, the book is worth reading on the strength of some of its rib-breakingly farcical set-pieces and wry ripostes. It is, in summation, a perfectly reasonable read.

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Jul 21, 2012 Manda rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2012

This is a very Stephen Fry thing - full of witty one liners, and innuendo. Not the kind of thing to make me laugh out loud, but I quietly enjoyed it. However I didn't think that it really worked as a book.

We spend a lot of time with Aidrian as a school boy, and then as a teacher, and at a college. But the book is actually about events over a two year period after college - and we are only given cryptic highlights of the major events over those two years, insterspersed between scenes from Aidria...more

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Jan 26, 2012 Timothy Hinkle rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club

Part of the fun of realizing that a novel's narrator is unreliable is that the whole structure of the book becomes a puzzle—which are the bits that we ought to believe? Fry (or, I suppose, whoever the book's narrator is meant to be) insists from the beginning, however, that this is not the game that he's playing, claiming that "Not one word of the following is true."

So, what actually is the game? Is Fry aiming for a certain effect, or is this just a lazily tossed-off first novel which fails to h...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Hayley Lamb added it · review of another edition

A little difficult to start and somewhat confusing at first with the jumps in time (which aren't highlighted so I didn't even notice until a third of the way through!); however, I persevered and am glad I did. Once you get past the fleshing out and into the real meat of the book, it picks up a lot of momentum and becomes a very enjoyable read. Sublimely written, the book oozes with intellectual wit and is genuinely very humourous and emotional in turns. Not one I'd recommend for fledgling reader...more

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Sep 28, 2010 Kate O'Hanlon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: general-fiction

The Liar starts out as an entertaining but fairly by the number semi-autobiographical coming of age novel. We follow Adrian, a pathological liar and standard issue upper middle class twit, as he goes through public school and Cambridge (naturally) . The insight into the prurient lives of boarding school boys is more than a little nauseating but the narrative voice is such a joy (and Fry is, frankly, hilarious) that it’s easy enough to get through.

About two thirds of the way through the plot sudd...more

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Feb 14, 2010 Nicki rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2010

This is a pretty tough read! I learnt so many things from this book, but it's just a bit as if Fry is trying to cram too much of his intelligence into The Liar as possible.

The first couple of chapters, I was struggling to new extremes. The only reason I stuck with the book was because I am such a big fan of Stephen Fry - and didn't believe it could be possible for him to write a bad book. I think, like a lot of others who have read this book, that it wouldn't have been worth my time of day if it...more

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May 01, 2013 Anushree rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Stephen Fry has to be one of my favourite people in the world. That man sits back and does a million things, and all of them so brilliantly, it's amazing!
I think it's necessary for people who love humour that they follow this gentleman: watch A Bit Of Fry And Laurie and Jeeves & Wooster, where he has worked alongside his best-friend and comedy partner Hugh Laurie (another one of my favourite people), and read The Liar.

What makes it so special? The whole thing is special! Fry, a self-declared...more

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About Stephen Fry

Stephen John Fry is an English comedian, writer, actor, humourist, novelist, poet, columnist, filmmaker, television personality and technophile. As one half of the Fry and Laurie double act with his comedy partner, Hugh Laurie, he has appeared in A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster. He is also famous for his roles in Blackadder and Wilde, and as the host of QI. In addition to writing fo...more

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Quotes from The Liar - Audio

“It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.” — 18 people liked it

“My first meeting with you only confirmed what I first suspected. You are a fraud, a charlatan and a shyster. My favourite kind of person, in fact.” — 14 people liked it

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The Liar

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