engage

Once again, we have something which i doubt was written by a native speaker of English. I cannot imagine a native speaker suggesting that someone engage with the language of a novel. One can engage in an activity. One can engage in a process or engage with other people. Those are all active states or persons. The language of a novel just sits there until someone picks up the book to read it--and it does not react to the person reading, it's the same for all readers. I'm going to say this is nonsense, and not written by a native speaker. The sentence: "You should writer an essay on it."--is another reason to suspect this was not written by a native speaker.

Setanta is right of course.

However if you want to be proactive, you could assume engagement with the language of the novel, and show your understanding of what you have read, if you used some of it in your essay. Presumebly if you were unable to "engage" with it then you wouldn't have gained much by trying to read it.

Excellent answers. Thank you.