I posted a review of Stephen Fry's The Liar on Goodreads. It's a pretty common thing to see Goodreads users complaining about the inability to give half stars when assigning ratings and I'm often torn between giving a book three or four stars; The Liar, however, represents the first time I found it difficult to decide whether to give the book two, three, or four stars—all I felt sure of was that it didn't deserve either one star or five. I had enjoyed reading The Liar quite a bit, but, nonetheless, judged it to be a pretty poor novel.
To my mind, one of the most important qualities necessary to a good novel is truth. Many would hold that fiction, by definition, is composed of untruths—lies, even—but I beg to differ. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, "Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures." A novel gives us a God's-eye view of an entire universe. We will never, no matter how far our science advances, be able see the whole of our own reality from outside of reality. No mere chronicler of fact will ever have the ability to compose a complete record of any occurrence within our reality. The novelist, however, can show us how things fit together in the world of the novel and this can give us some idea of how things might fit together in our own. In order to do this, it is necessary that the pieces of the novel actually do fit together—the world of the novel must be consistent. The Liar is not consistent; it really is composed of untruths and lies are lies whether they're lies about our reality or an imaginary one.
Some interesting Liar related links:
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