The houseguest from hell

Once upon a time, an untrustworthy story- teller seemed rather an enterprising creation — and some great books were written this way, like Lolita and The Good Soldier (from which Blake Morrison takes an epigraph). But nowadays having a fibber as compère seems painfully predictable. Only if our dodgy raconteur is strikingly engaging or funny do we, as readers, feel inclined to stay the course, to have it confirmed that our guide is actually a fraud, or killer, and his life a hollow sham.

The trick can still be pulled off. John Lanchester did it in The Debt to Pleasure, and Sebastian Faulks in Engleby, a book made interesting by the way it seems to be Faulks’s nightmare about how wrong everything could have gone for him in another life. Engleby is also well managed, the clues to the hero’s lunacy eked out carefully, so that the reader remains in some suspense, or at least uncertainty, for much of the book.

Blake Morrison’s new novel, The Last Weekend, however, opens with a statement so off-colour that you realise at once, with dismay, where you’re headed:

You know how it is with friends — the closer you get, the less you see them for what they are. They suck you in. They drag you down. You resist, but their allure’s too strong. Choked by their needs, you cease to see how mad they are.

That doesn’t sound at all right, does it? Chap must be barking.

Halfway down the second page, our host adds:

It’s not like I’m a rapist or a murderer. Even if I were, I would be honest with you. I’m trying to tell the story, that’s all — not to unburden myself, or to extenuate some offence, but to set things straight.