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 hang together only because its author failed to care? Taken individually, I found all the chapters to be at least reasonably entertaining. There aren't too many other novels that I would think of in terms of which chapter was my favorite (it's Chapter Six—I highly recommend it and suspect it would remain quite enjoyable if you read it alone and gave the rest of the book amiss). Taken as a whole, the book fails miserably to cohere into any meaningful narrative.

It is just possible that this is the point: that a life which is the product of lies will inevitably be, on the whole, unsatisfactory, no matter how charming and diverting it may seem at any given moment. That the expert liar's power, derived by manipulation of others' perception, is bought through surrendering the ability to form real human relationships. It is also possible that I was desperate to read some meaning into a hopelessly shallow text.

(view spoiler)[The titular liar is generally taken to be Adrian Healey, but could just as easily be Donald Trefusis with his Mendax (Latin for lying) device. By the end of the book, the two characters have become indistinguishable and both are clearly stand-ins for the author. (hide spoiler)]