CANR
WORK TITLE: Parallel Lines
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.edwardstaubyn.com/
CITY: London
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
LAST VOLUME: CANR 310
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born January 14, 1960, in London, England; son of Roger (a surgeon) and Lorna St. Aubyn; married Nicole Shulman, 1987 (divorced, 1990); children; Lucien and Eleanor.
EDUCATION:Attended Keble College, Oxford University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:Betty Trask award, 1992, for Never Mind; Prix Feminina Etranger, 2007, for Mother’s Milk; South Bank Show Award, 2007, for Mother’s Milk; named one of the ten best books of 2012, Time, 2012, for At Last; At Last was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times, and a Best Book of the Year by Time and Esquire; Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, 2014, for Lost for Words.
WRITINGS
The novel Mother’s Milk was adapted as a feature film starring Jack Davenport and Annabel Mullion, Foxy Films, 2012.
SIDELIGHTS
Born to an aristocratic family whose history can be traced back to the Norman conquest of England, Edward St. Aubyn endured a painful childhood despite his privileged existence. When he was a young boy, his father raped him over a period of two years. He kept the abuse a secret because his father threatened to kill his son if he told anyone. As he grew into a young man, St. Aubyn unsurprisingly turned to drugs—in his case, heroin—and was addicted for several years, including while he was attending Oxford University.
Later he sought therapy, but St. Aubyn discovered the best treatment could be found in writing. In a painfully personal process, St. Aubyn began the “Patrick Melrose” series, an autobiographical novelization of his experiences. The first three books are Never Mind, Bad News, and Some Hope, and they were later published together in the United States as Some Hope: A Trilogy. More recently, St. Aubyn completed Mother’s Milk, a novel that features his protagonist from the previous books. The author told Rachel Cooke in an Observer interview how cathartic the books have been for him: “Once I started writing, I decided to stop the analysis. I didn’t need it any more. But I knew it was good because I went to see my analyst after making a suicide attempt. I was very, very precarious and then I felt a lot better. I stopped feeling mad; there was some sense of order.”
St. Aubyn introduces Patrick, age five, in Never Mind. While the book most definitely has serious scenes, including father David’s physical and sexual abuse of Patrick and his physical abuse of Patrick’s mother, a large element of the novel also involves skewering the snobbery of the British upper class.
Leo Carey, writing in the New York Times Book Review, felt that the combination of humor and disturbing child abuse has a jarring effect. “The unexpectedness of these scenes adds to the shocking effect, but it also invites the suspicion that St. Aubyn isn’t quite capable of juxtaposing comedy and savagery in a way that would enhance the effects of both,” Carey remarked. The critic added, however, that “the idiosyncrasy of his decision to turn pain into a comedy of manners is appealing, even when it leads to miscalculation.” Much of the comedy stems from banter among Patrick’s family and a number of dinner guests, including an aristocratic philosopher, an American journalist, another upper-class family friend, and his vacuous, twenty-year-old girlfriend. “The one-liners, put downs and out-and-out ‘gladiatorial combat’ around the dinner table is very funny stuff,” attested a Reading Matters reviewer.
Bad News has Patrick, now twenty-two, traveling to New York City to collect his father’s body. His father died in a hotel room, and Patrick sees this as an opportunity to indulge in his heroin habit while spending his family’s money on hotels and luxuries. There is little action to the story, much of which involves interior monologue. Carey appreciated the “stylistically ambitious passages,” and added: “Where St. Aubyn really succeeds, however, is in evoking the desperate logistics of serious drug use.”
Some Hope catches up with Patrick eight years later, after he has kicked his addiction. Less caustic than the earlier novels, the story is set at a country estate where Patrick is vacationing and is, “once again, a comedy of manners.” Carey commented: “The handling, however, is far more assured. … St. Aubyn expertly mixes pathos and humor.”
While Patrick’s father, David, was the dominating force in the previous books, with Mother’s Milk it is Patrick’s mother who is the concern. The story covers a period of four years. Patrick is married with children, and he is concerned about his aging mother’s health, but more importantly he is resentful that she is selling the family’s estate in the south of France to a fraudulent shaman named Seamus. Patrick consoles himself with an affair, while his wife finds her life drained by motherly duties that leave her too tired for sex. The bitterness swelling in Patrick’s heart is beginning to turn him into a reflection of his father, and although he does not sexually abuse his kids, he becomes noticeably crueler. “This is the underlying and more or less serious message of the novel—that the sins of the parents are cyclically revisited on the offspring,” explained New York Times Book Review critic Charles McGrath.
St. Aubyn received considerable praise for Mother’s Milk, which was nominated for the Booker Prize. “ Mother’s Milk is so good—so fantastically well-written, profound and humane—that all the other stuff, even the inhospitable biography, bleaches to grey beside it,” enthused Cooke. Michael Arditti admitted that the novel “is not perfect,” yet it marks “the re-emergence of a major literary talent,” and a Publishers Weekly writer described it as an “elegant and witty satire on the dissatisfactions of family life.”
At Last represents the culmination and conclusion of Aubyn’s critically lauded “Patrick Melrose ” series. It is a work characterized by mingled trepidation and expectation, for its central character—the tormented Patrick Melrose readers first encountered in Never Mind—is about to be without parents. At Last largely restricts its narrative to a funeral, exploring Patrick’s emotional and psychological response to his mother’s passing. Patrick’s mother, Eleanor, was an American heiress whose seeming gentility and charity obscured a cruel interior. She, like her husband, suffocated Patrick, leaving him emotionally damaged and stunted. Patrick feels her death may liberate him, allowing him to flourish in a world free from his parents and the baleful shadows they cast on his memories. At his mother’s funeral service, however, he begins to feel that the freedom he has so long sought could prove to be a chimera; he is unsure what real autonomy will mean for him and whether it will permit him to grow in the ways he anticipates. This melancholia clashes with other sensations: euphoria and relief. As At Last progresses and Eleanor’s funeral transitions into a jovial repast, Patrick begins to understand that his new and parent-less world will offer him freedom, if only he will be brave enough to embrace it. At Last may concern itself with a single day—and with the complex brew of emotions generated over the course of its duration—but it is presented as a fragmented, splintered narrative. St. Aubyn melds flashbacks with the present to convey Patrick’s ongoing suffering and show how he has grown to accept—if not forgive—his parents.
At Last received an overwhelmingly positive reception, with most reviewers commending St. Aubyn for his inventive, witty prose and for using his talents to explore themes, which would intimidate less audacious or knowing authors. Philip Womack, writing in the London Telegraph, was struck by St. Aubyn’s sheer artistry, noting that “St Aubyn’s technique is to crystallise emotional intensity into sentences of arctic beauty, which can be caustically witty or brutal. His novels are uncommonly well controlled, and thus their impact is all the more powerful, as if the Alsatian had bitten you despite being tied down.” There were reviewers who found the narrative arc presented in At Last somewhat disappointing. To these critics, Patrick’s ascent from addiction and crippling depression to contentment make for uninspired literature. Amanda Craig, who reviewed At Last for the New Statesman, grumbled that the novel “is less formally interesting than St Aubyn’s previous novels. It is as if, released from the engine of hatred and misery that powered his earlier work, he has lost the very qualities that made his prose so memorable and uncomfortable.” James Walton agreed, asserting in the Spectator that “the effect of Patrick’s transformation is rather like when a roistering friend goes on the wagon: however pleased you are at his progress, you can’t help noticing that he’s a lot less fun.” These critiques, mounted by a vocal minority of reviewers, contrasted with the praises meted out by reviewers such as Francine Prose in the New York Times Book Reviews, who likened the experience of reading At Last to the “exultation and relief of watching that sailor, so often nearly drowned, bob, gasping, to the surface.”
In Lost for Words, a group gathers to choose the winner of an award called the Elysian Prize. The chair of the committee is a former parliamentarian named Malcolm Craig. Other members include actors, writers, and academics. The volume includes excerpts from the books that have been submitted for consideration, some of which feature comically bad writing.
A Publishers Weekly reviewer described the book as “a modest entertainment from a writer whose output had hitherto been uniformly exceptional.” Anne Enright, a contributor to the New York Times Book Review Web site, suggested: “Everything St. Aubyn writes is worth reading for the cleansing rancor of his intelligence and the fierce elegance of his prose—but rollicking, he is not. A knockabout comic novel needs a plot that believes in its own twists and turns, and that is not on offer here.” London Telegraph Online writer Tim Martin commented: “Its narrative skips so indefatigably between perspectives—an Indian princeling, a dysfunctional academic, a beautiful inconstant writer and her desperate admirers—that the book spins wildly free of any emotional centre. This, in turn, puts unconscionable stress on its tissue-thin strands of plot.” However, Martin added: “There are occasional glimpses of a more thoughtful novel straining at the confines of this thin farce.” Spectator critic Sam Leith remarked: “This is great fun to read but not, in the end, all that much of a novel. In sending up a prize that’s of more interest to gossip columnists than serious readers, St Aubyn has written a novel that’s going to be of more interest to gossip columnists than serious readers.” “St. Aubyn offers a hearty satire, full of laughs and groans,” asserted Mark Levine in Booklist. Commonweal reviewer Dominic Preziosi stated: “Writing poorly on purpose is best left to those who can write especially well. … Edward St. Aubyn writes badly in Lost for Words, which is another way of saying just how good, and funny, he is.”
St. Aubyn’s 1998 novel On the Edge was released in the United States in 2014. In this volume, he offers a satirical story about new age spirituality. Among the characters are a wealthy woman named Brooke, a gay guru named Adam, a banker named Peter, and a shaman named Kenneth. Some of them meet at a dinner party in San Francisco and converge again at a tantric course at Esalen. Mary Ellen Quinn, a reviewer in Booklist, praised St. Aubyn’s “laser-like humor and crystalline imagery.” A Kirkus Reviews critic described the book as a “diverting but minor early work from a major novelist.” “The joy of reading this novel derives not from the story but the storytelling,” suggested a writer in Publishers Weekly.
A Clue to the Exit is another early St. Aubyn novel, released in the United States in 2015. The volume’s protagonist is Charlie Fairburn, a dying screenwriter and aspiring novelist. After ditching his depression meds, he travels to Monte Carlo, where he pays a young woman named Angelique to gamble for him. He loses most of his money, then continues traveling, eventually arriving in the Sahara desert. A critic in Kirkus Reviews suggested: “Though with plenty of good moments, this ranks as lesser work by an author who’s done much better.” “St. Aubyn delivers memorable characters, dark humor, and sublime writing in this stand-alone effort,” remarked Barbara Love in Library Journal. In Booklist, Quinn described the volume as “mordant, moving, shot through with incandescent prose.”
(open new)Dunbar is a retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear set in the current era. Dunbar has had his business taken from him and whines about it to Peter in an expensive English sanitarium. He is upset that daughters Abby and Megan have outplayed him, while daughter Florence is living independently in Wyoming. Dunbar believes he needs to escape and get off the meds to save himself.
Writing in New York Times Book Review, Cynthia Ozick reasoned that, “with one exception, Dunbar — like the genre novel it mostly resembles — keeps the story and loses the meaning. The exception is the long central passage where, as Dunbar wanders half-hallucinating in the Cumbrian wilderness, the only dialogue is between the mind and itself. A heartbreaking scrim of the broken and unspoken, image upon image, flames up.” Ozick explained: “Here we can feel the writer feeling, and with Lawrentian clarity: a distillation of harrowed human pity. Retelling becomes reliving, a fleeting wisp of Shakespeare’s elusive breath. All the rest, in the usual way of thriller fiction, is puppetry and plot.”
In a review in Maclean’s, Brian Bethune wrote: “Throughout Dunbar’s struggle on the stormy heath, interspersed with brilliant skewering of privilege, a reader can see both the tragedy of Shakespeare’s old man–who ‘but ever slenderly knew himself’–and hints of the journey to self-awareness that” may have guided the author in his younger years. Writing in Spectator, Patrick Skene Catling observed that “the overall focus, satisfactorily, is on contemporary social pathology and Dunbar’s moral transcendence. Most of the novel is harsh; all of it is entertaining.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor found it to be “a superb, assured reminder that as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods–and that ain’t good.”
Double Blind features a wide range of characters that present a unique ideas as to how to save the world. Sebastian deals with mental illness, while Lucy has a tumor. She works for Hunter, who is aggressive at navigating his company to bigger and better acquisitions while heavily under the influence of any and all drugs. Naturalist Francis and biologist Olivia meet at a conference and are immediately smitten with each other. Lucy comes to visit them and Hunter unexpectedly shows up in his helicopter.
A contributor to Publishers Weekly lauded that the author “brings off a seemingly effortless and provocative examination of the mind and its refractions,” adding that “this one’s not to be missed.” Reviewing the novel in New York Times Book Review, Rob Doyle stated: “For all the promiscuous surveying of contemporary scientific thought, St. Aubyn is at heart a very English traditionalist of the social novel, and Double Blind is most satisfying when the big ideas make room for depictions of intimacy, professional striving, family, hedonistic appetite and sexual confusion. The scenes of broad satire … generally hit their targets.” Overall, Doyle opined that the novel “fumbles in its delivery.”
In a review in New Statesman, Johanna Thomas-Corr commented that “the most natural and affecting interactions are between Martin and his patient Sebastian. We are reminded that St Aubyn is at his best when he’s exploring deep psychological pain. But for much of the novel, it feels as if he is hiding behind a wall of intellectual discourse.” Thomas-Corr continued: “Consequences rarely carry from one chapter to the next. Tension dissipates. If emotions, anecdote, psychology and narrative are so important, where are the deeper registers of empathy and pathos that made the Melrose novels so rich and memorable? As it is, Double Blind fails to convince either on the science or on the human drama. Maybe Thelma had a point.”
In an article in London Guardian, Hadley Freeman explained that “Double Blind is a book of big ideas, in which the characters experiment with medicine, psychology, narcotics, religion and meditation to understand themselves and find peace. But as cerebral as the book is, it is also deeply felt, because St Aubyn has been thinking about these issues for decades.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor described it as being “a thought-provoking, smartly told story that brings philosophy, medicine, and neuroscience into boardroom and bedroom.”
Parallel Lines continues story established in Double Blind. Sebastian is being unsuccessfully treated for schizophrenia while lamenting the state of the English countryside. His twin sister, Olivia, is now married and raising her kid and writes radio scripts when she can. Hunter sold his company and is living with Lucy.
Writing in New York Times Book Review, Dwight Garner lauded that “St. Aubyn is worth reading, nearly all the time, because his novels contain brutal and funny intellectual content. He’s a briny writer, one who dispatches a stream of salty commentary, sentences that whoosh past like arrows.” Garner noted that “St. Aubyn’s talents are mighty, so much so that you wonder why this novel, and its predecessor, aren’t even better than they are. Parallel Lines is a high-level entertainment, but it’s so incident- and idea-packed that nothing quite sticks.”
In a review in New Statesman, Nicholas Harris remarked that “the tension of Sebastian’s trajectory is his inevitable convergence with Olivia, parallel lines brought, like charged cables, into crackling contact. But while we watch them approach each other, we endure an ocean of novelistic incidents, longing for the comic similes and wrought dialogue a full-strength St Aubyn can bring off.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor pointed out that “St. Aubyn’s closing, which leaves room for another episode, is quite sincere.” The same reviewer called it “an elegantly arch but empathetic excursion into impending apocalypse, and some of St. Aubyn’s best work yet.”(close new)
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, December 15, 2011, Mary Ellen Quinn, review of At Last, p. 20; April 1, 2014, Mark Levine, review of Lost for Words, p. 20; September 1, 2014, Mary Ellen Quinn, review of On the Edge, p. 46; August 1, 2015, Mary Ellen Quinn, review of A Clue to the Exit, p. 27.
Commonweal, July 11, 2014, Dominic Preziosi, “Writing Wrongs,” review of Lost for Words, p. 33.
Entertainment Weekly, November 11, 2005, Tina Jordan, review of Mother’s Milk, p. 75.
Guardian (London, England), January 13, 2007, Hadley Freeman, profile of Edward St. Aubyn; March 20, 2021, Hadley Freeman, “Edward St Aubyn: ‘I Never Read Things about Myself Because I’m So Easily Crushed.'”
Independent (London, England), January 15, 2006, author interview; January 20, 2006, Michael Arditti, review of Mother’s Milk.
Kirkus Reviews, October 1, 2003, review of Some Hope: A Trilogy, p. 1198; August 15, 2005, review of Mother’s Milk, p. 880; December 15, 2011, review of At Last; March 15, 2014, review of Lost for Words; September 1, 2014, review of On the Edge; June 1, 2015, review of A Clue to the Exit; July 15, 2017, review of Dunbar; February 1, 2021, review of Double Blind; May 15, 2025, review of Parallel Lines.
Library Journal, December 1, 2011, Shaunna Hunter, review of At Last, p. 119; February 15, 2014, Barbara Love, review of Lost for Words, p. 100; September 1, 2015, Barbara Love, review of A Clue to the Exit, p. 96.
Maclean’s, October 1, 2017, Brian Bethune, review of Dunbar, p. 77.
New Statesman, May 16, 2011, Amanda Craig, review of At Last, p. 48; March 26, 2021, Johanna Thomas-Corr, review of Double Blind, p. 78.
New Yorker, December 7, 2015, Elizabeth Minkel, review of A Clue to the Exit, p. 76.
New York Times Book Review, January 4, 2004, Leo Carey, review of Some Hope, p. 6; November 13, 2005, Charles Mcgrath, review of Mother’s Milk, p. 12; January 14, 2007, Ihsan Taylor, review of Mother’s Milk, p. 24; February 10, 2012, Francine Prose, review of At Last; October 29, 2017, Cynthia Ozick, review of Dunbar, p. 11; June 27, 2021, Rob Doyle, review of Double Blind, p. 16; June 15, 2025, Dwight Garner, review of Parallel Lines, p. 15.
Observer (London, England), January 8, 2006, Rachel Cooke, review of Mother’s Milk; April 13, 2012, Adam Mars-Jones, review of At Last.
Publishers Weekly, August 22, 2005, review of Mother’s Milk, p. 38; February 17, 2014, review of Lost for Words, p. 77; August 18, 2014, review of On the Edge, p. 49; June 15, 2015, review of A Clue to the Exit, p. 57; March 15, 2021, review of Double Blind, p. 44.
Spectator, March 7, 1992, review of Never Mind, p. 30; November 14, 1992, review of Bad News, p. 43; June 25, 1994, review of Some Hope, p. 31; May 23, 1998, review of On the Edge, p. 36; September 16, 2000, review of A Clue to the Exit, p. 45; December 31, 2005, D.J. Taylor, review of Mother’s Milk, p. 35; May 14, 2011, James Walton, review of At Last, p. 39; May 3, 2014, Sam Leith, “Biting Back,” review of Lost for Words, p. 43; September 23, 2017, Patrick Skene Catling, review of Dunbar, p. 30; May 9, 2025, Nicholas Harris, review of Parallel Lines.
Telegraph (London, England), April 28, 2011, Philip Womack, review of At Last.
Times Literary Supplement, March 6, 1992, review of Never Mind, p. 20; November 13, 1992, review of Bad News, p. 21; June 24, 1994, review of Some Hope, p. 24; May 15, 1998, review of On the Edge, p. 23; September 8, 2000, Theo Tait, review of A Clue to the Exit, p. 23.
ONLINE
Alain Elkann Interviews, https://www.alainelkanninterviews.com/ (January 28, 2024), author interview.
Edward St. Aubyn website, http://www.edwardstaubyn.com (December 15, 2025).
Fresh Air, https://www.npr.org/ (May 18, 2018), Terry Gross and David Bianculli, “In Life and Fiction, Edward St. Aubyn Sheds the Weight of His Past.”
Man Overboard, http://manoverboard-nz.blogspot.com/ (September 22, 2006), Barry Dunedin, review of Mother’s Milk.
New Pages, http://newpages.com/ (May 14, 2007), Danielle LaVaque-Manty, review of Mother’s Milk.
New York Times Book Review Online, http://www.nytimes.com/ (May 23, 2014), Anne Enright, review of Lost for Words.
Reading Matters, http://kimbofo.typepad.com/readingmatters/ (November 1, 2006), review of Some Hope.
Telegraph Online, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (May 2, 2014), Mick Brown, author interview; (May 9, 2014), Tim Martin, review of Lost for Words.
Edward St Aubyn was born in London in 1960. He was educated at Westminster school and Keble college, Oxford University. He is the author of nine novels of which ‘Mother’s Milk’ was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, won the 2007 Prix Femina Etranger and won the 2007 South Bank Show award for literature.
His first novel, ‘Never Mind’ (1992) won the Betty Trask award. This novel, along with ‘Bad News’ (1992) and ‘Some Hope’ (1994) became a trilogy, now collectively published under the title ‘Some Hope’.
His other fiction consists of ‘On the Edge’ (1998) which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and A Clue to the Exit (2000).
Edward St Aubyn
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Edward St Aubyn
A man signing a book
St Aubyn in 2007
Born 1960 (age 64–65)
London, England
Occupation Author, journalist
Education Westminster School
Alma mater Keble College, Oxford
Notable works Patrick Melrose series
Spouse Nicola Shulman
(m. 1987; div. 1990)
Edward St Aubyn (born 1960) is an English author and journalist. He is the author of eleven novels, including notably the semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels. In 2006, Mother's Milk was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Early life and education
St Aubyn was born in 1960[1] in London, the son of Roger Geoffrey St Aubyn (1906–1985), a surgeon, and his second wife, Lorna Mackintosh (1929–2005). On his father's side, he is a great-great-grandson of Sir Edward St Aubyn, 1st Baronet, and a great-nephew of John St Aubyn, 1st Baron St Levan.[2]
St Aubyn's father was first married to Sophie Helene Freiin von Puthon, daughter of Baron Heinrich Puthon, long-time president of the Salzburg Festival, whom he divorced in 1957. St Aubyn has two half-sisters from his father's first marriage, and an elder sister, Alexandra.[2] He grew up in London and France, where his family had houses.[3] He has described an unhappy childhood in which he was repeatedly raped by his sexually abusive father from the ages of 5 to 8, with the complicity of his mother.[3][4] St. Aubyn later said of his father, "He had a small canvas, but he was as destructive as he could be. If he’d been given Cambodia, or China, I’m sure he would have done sterling work".[5]
St Aubyn attended Sussex House[6] and then Westminster School. In 1979 he went on to read English at Keble College, Oxford. At the time a heroin addict, he graduated with a pass, the lowest possible class of degree.[3][7]
Patrick Melrose series
"Patrick Melrose" and "Bad News (Patrick Melrose)" redirect here. For the TV adaptation, see Patrick Melrose (TV series).
Five of St Aubyn's novels, Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother's Milk, and At Last, form The Patrick Melrose Novels, the first four of which were republished in a single volume in 2012, in anticipation of the fifth. They are based on the author's own life; the titular protagonist grows up in a highly dysfunctional upper-class English family, and deals with his father's sexual abuse, the deaths of both parents, alcoholism, heroin addiction and recovery, and marriage and parenthood.[8]
The books have been hailed as an exploration of how emotional health can be carved out of childhood trauma.[9]
Mother's Milk was made into a feature film released in 2011. The screenplay was written by St Aubyn and director Gerald Fox. It starred Jack Davenport, Adrian Dunbar, Diana Quick, and Margaret Tyzack in her last performance.
Adaptations
Main article: Patrick Melrose (TV series)
In 2018 a five-part television series, Patrick Melrose was broadcast, a joint production of Showtime and Sky Atlantic. Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Patrick Melrose (with the young Patrick played by Sebastian Maltz), with each episode based on a different novel in the series. The series premiered on Showtime on 12 May 2018 to favourable reviews.[10]
Awards and honours
1992 Betty Trask Award winner for Never Mind[11]
1998 Guardian Fiction Prize shortlisted for On the Edge[12]
2006 Man Booker Prize shortlisted for Mother's Milk[13]
2007 Prix Femina Etranger winner for Mother's Milk[14]
2007 South Bank Show award on literature winner for Mother's Milk[14]
2011 elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature[15]
2014 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize winner for Lost for Words[16]
Personal life
From 1987 to 1990, St Aubyn was married to the author Nicola Shulman, now Marchioness of Normanby.[2]
He has a son by Jane Longman, daughter of publisher (head of Longman)[17] Mark Frederick Kerr Longman (1916–1972) and Lady Elizabeth Mary (1924–2016). Her mother, the elder daughter of Rudolph Lambart, 10th Earl of Cavan, was a bridesmaid and friend of Queen Elizabeth II.[18][19]
Works
Never Mind. William Heinemann. 1992. ISBN 9780434734528.
Bad News. William Heinemann. 1992. ISBN 9780434734535.
Some Hope. William Heinemann. 1994. ISBN 9780434734542.
On The Edge. Chatto & Windus. 1998. ISBN 978-1447253563.
A Clue to the Exit. Chatto & Windus. 2000. ISBN 0701169605.
Mother's Milk. Grove Press, Open City Books. 2005. ISBN 978-1890447403.
At Last. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2012. ISBN 978-0374298890.
Lost for Words. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2014. ISBN 9780374280291.
Dunbar. Hogarth Press. 2017. ISBN 9781101904282.
Double Blind. Harvill Secker. 2021. ISBN 9781787300255.
Parallel Lines. Jonathan Cape, 2025. ISBN 9781787335592.
Edward St Aubyn
Jan 28, 2024
Edward St Aubyn
DESIRE FOR FREEDOM. Edward St Aubyn is a British novelist. Five of his books – Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk and At Last – form the semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose Novels. In 2018 Benedict Cumberbatch starred in the title role of the five-part drama Patrick Melrose. Edward’s more recent work includes Dunbar – which retells King Lear – and Double Blind, which has been described as ‘a book of big ideas, in which the characters experiment with medicine, psychology, narcotics, religion and meditation to understand themselves and find peace. But as cerebral as the book is, it is also deeply felt, because St Aubyn has been thinking about these issues for decades.’
You can listen to the podcast of this interview here.
Edward St Aubyn, why did you tell the secrets of your childhood life in the Patrick Melrose novels?
I always wanted to be a novelist and started when I was 12 years old, but reaching page 40 seemed to be the ceiling of every novel I was able to write until I wrote Never Mind. I knew that I was evading the central subject, the thing that I had not told any other human being until I was 25, when I went into psychoanalysis after a suicide attempt and told my analyst that I would try and kill myself again unless I told him the truth about my childhood. Writing Never Mind was an expansion of that process, but distinct from it because the purpose of writing is to interest the reader not alleviate the author.
How come in your youth you drank and took drugs excessively yet fortunately survived?
16 was a disastrous year in my life in which I discovered drugs in a serious way. My descent was vertical. By the time I got to my A-Levels I was unable to get the results that were required by Oxford, which had already offered me a place. I went into exile and pursued my drug addiction, living in hotels in Paris and New York. I inherited some money from my grandmother, so there was no practical limit on the amount of drugs that I could take. Luckily, all my appetites were alive at the same time and so I also ate lots of very good food. What saved my life was eating in good restaurants.
“I spoke in every voice except my own.”
Edward St Aubyn/Benedict Cumberbatch. Patrick Melrose. Photo credit SKY.
Benedict Cumberbatch delivers a powerhouse performance as English aristocrat Patrick Melrose in the “devastating and brilliant adaptation” (The Economist) of the novels by Edward St Aubyn. Chronicling the hilarious highs and devastating lows of his tumultuous life, this blackly humorous drama follows Patrick from his childhood trauma at the hands of an abusive father and neglectful mother, to the peak of his heroin addiction, and his attempts to stay sober and support his family.
Photo credit: SKY
Edward St Aubyn, how did you manage to have a normal life despite your addiction?
I did not. Between 17 and 22 I was obsessively solitary, completely fluid in my identity and insanely empathic. There was no apparent limit to my sensitivity. I could imagine the heartbeat of the robin sitting on the windowsill. I spoke in every voice except my own. I felt so invaded by other people’s presence that during those years the whole point was to not see anybody who knew anything about me, so my identity could not be pinned down. I felt as if everyone was invading me, so I imagined that if I became like them they wouldn’t want to attack me. It was very exhausting. If I walked down Fifth Avenue I’d have to do the voice of everyone I passed for just a few seconds in order to deal with their potential takeover. Quite mad. The only difference between me and a schizophrenic was that I was making the voices rather than hearing the voices. But I had to speak in those voices, I had no choice. I was in an unending state of mimicry, with the last voice provoking the next one.
In Never Mind you disclosed that as a young child you were repeatedly raped by your father who you believed would kill you if you told anyone?
He was fond of telling a story, which was clearly – given our relationship – a veiled menace to me, about his regiment, the 4th Hussars, being sent on a tour of India in the 1920s. He went on a pig-sticking expedition with lots of very grand people in the Raj. They were out in the Indian wilderness and one of the party developed rabies. They trussed him up in a net which they tied to a tree. The rest of the party were having dinner – lots of silver on the table, turbaned servants bringing food, and this man, at some distance from the table, was screaming and writhing. My father got up, went into his tent and got his pistol, and walked over to the man and shot him in the head in front of everyone else at the dinner. The dinner party fell silent, and my father sat down and said, “Much the kindest thing to do.”
Later your father became a doctor?
Yes, he turned out to have a sinister kind of medical vocation. He was only interested in people who were mad or dying.
When your father died, you flew to New York and when you had to go to see his body you bought drugs from the dealers around the park. Is what you describe invention or did it happen?
It’s a combination. A lot of the incidents were true to that journey, but at the same time there was a compression of the whole history of my addiction into a single day. Each of those five Melrose novels, except for Mother’s Milk, is set in one day in one place. The subject matter was so explosive that I needed the containment of that kind of classicism.
Your creativity won out over your self-destruction by 51>49 and you started publishing your books. Did you feel relieved?
I don’t associate writing Never Mind with relief at all, but with extreme, almost unbearable tension. I had to lie on the floor while I had panic attacks. I wasn’t taking any drugs or drinking at all. I had given up cigarettes, which I used to smoke very heavily. I didn’t even drink coffee. Writing Never Mind the sweat splashed onto the loose pages which I then posted over my shoulder to my girlfriend who very generously typed them out.
Do you write longhand?
I still write everything longhand first. Then I transfer it to a computer, print it out and correct by hand.
Do you do your editing by yourself?
I do my editing alone to begin with, because my first draft is not a first draft at all, apart from with Never Mind. Because it was so emotionally unbearable to write I didn’t edit it at all. I could barely write it. It was very much on the edge of what I was capable of. But my method since my second novel, Bad News, and my current method is to rewrite at the time, so that my first draft is in fact already a 20th or 30th draft.
“I had the double relief of having turned myself into Patrick Melrose, and then Benedict Cumberbatch taking over the burden of being Patrick”
Edward St Aubyn, the language you use and your descriptive power and attention to detail are very precise?
I have a strong visual imagination. I write what I see in my mind’s eye, but I don’t try to describe things exhaustively. I’m interested in the minimum amount that you can say which tells you everything else about a room or about a person. It may be the way they speak or the way they dress. There’s always a selection, and my descriptions of, for example, the house in France are very compressed, but I hope that the readers build for themselves a picture of the place in their imaginations.
Are you in love with the English language?
If I could speak more languages, I’m sure I’d be in love with them as well. I’m in love with precision, with beauty, with elegance, with wit. The trouble with being a writer as opposed to being a composer or a painter is that people don’t get up in the morning and talk to each other in symphonies or paint an oil painting of what they want for lunch. We use words all the time. It’s a very tarnished medium, and to try and turn it into art is a particular kind of effort which is unlike the efforts of making art out of music or painting.
One of your books is a satirical look at the English upper class.
Some Hope, the third volume, is set at a party in a country house and to some extent is about my disappointment at what happens when you penetrate the inner sanctum of high society. Glamour is another kind of false consolation, similar to narcotics but less poisonous.
Coming from an upper class family yourself, were you criticised for the subjects of your writing?
With Never Mind, I thought that people would cross the street to avoid me because I was so contaminated, but in fact people were kind to me and said “what an awful thing to have happened, I’m so sorry.” They responded in a way which my paranoia had not prepared me for at all. With Some Hope, I thought, well, that’s it, I’ll never be invited to a party again, but in fact people were queuing up to claim that they were included in the book, saying “I feel I’ve been portrayed” when they weren’t in it; they had nothing to do with it at all. (laughs) There was lots of speculation about who a character was based on, when in many cases I simply made them up.
How long did it take to write the Patrick Melrose series?
The first sentence in the first chapter of Never Mind was October 1988, and the last sentence of the last chapter of At Last was 2010. So 22 years, five novels, but with other novels in between. I thought I was writing a trilogy, and finished the trilogy. Then I made excursions into other fields and other subjects, producing two non-Melrose novels. After ten years, I was drawn back to the Melroses, and wrote two more volumes. I now feel I have completed the series and since then I have written three more non-Melrose novels.
Were you pleased with the TV series when Benedict Cumberbatch played Patrick Melrose?
Benedict had tweeted that the two roles he most wanted to play in the world were Hamlet and Patrick Melrose. The power of the tweet is not always benign, but in this case it was very helpful and very benign. The series won four BAFTAs and got lots of Emmy nominations. It was a great success. Benedict did a brilliant job, and I had the double relief of having turned myself into Patrick Melrose, and then Benedict Cumberbatch taking over the burden of being Patrick, so the story moved further and further away from me, and now plays no part in my inner life. I was very lucky with the whole team who worked on the series, Edward Berger, the director, David Nicholls who adapted it, and the producers, Michael Jackson and Rachel Horowitz. It was a magical experience, very unlike the loneliness of writing.
Edward St Aubyn
Edward St Aubyn
Edward St Aubyn
Edward St Aubyn
Edward St Aubyn
Edward St Aubyn
“The common driving force of all my work is a desire for freedom”
Edward St Aubyn, what kind of writer are you?
Similes and metaphors play a big part in my writing and come to me unprompted. My imagination gives me these things, which is very generous of it, and my troubled personality does what it can with what my imagination gives me. Dialogue also comes relatively easily because of my history of mimicry and impersonation, and it sometimes feels just like eavesdropping. Describing things in detail, or making elusive ideas clear is very, very hard and takes a lot of work, but the hard work needs to be hidden and not passed on to the reader.
Because even to say little things you need to know so much more?
That was one of the challenges of writing Double Blind. I’m now perhaps 60% of the way through the sequel to Double Blind, and there will be a third novel. To write a few pages about genetics or ecology, I may have to read a dozen books, and I’m a very slow reader. And then I throw away 99.9% of what I’ve read. Distilling the research is one of the things a reader is owed in a novel of ideas or a historical novel, and has to be a fairly ruthless process.
Do you continue to write about family matters?
Double Blind is not particularly focused on family, nor was Lost for Words, my satire about literary prizes. Dunbar certainly is, but that’s because it’s based on King Lear. The engine under the bonnet, the common driving force of all my work, is a desire for freedom. It’s a jailbreak, an attempt at liberation of some sort or another. In the case of Patrick Melrose it’s very clear that I wanted to be liberated from my conditioning, from my class, from my trauma, from my personal past. That was the prison that I needed to break out of. Double Blind and its intended sequels are about materialism and its discontents: dualism, fragmentation, a kind of schizoid mentality in which we claim to believe one thing and in fact believe quite different things but you don’t want to admit to them because they sound unscientific. It’s much more of a cultural and educational prison that I’m trying to break out of. From my point of view, these two projects are like the lower lid and the upper lid of the same eye, with the same gaze, which is: how the hell do I get out of here?
Double Blind didn’t appear out of nowhere; it originates in the other major thread in my work, apart from the Melrose novels, which is about the nature of consciousness. I went to a conference in 1996 called “Towards the Science of Consciousness”, and I was very intrigued to find that consciousness, which is the only thing we know we have, and the basis of everything else that we think we know, is not successfully included in science’s majestic description of the world. So how good a description can it be if it can’t tell us what is actually going on? The first-person narrative of experience and the third person narrative of experiment refuse to be reduced to each other. This is the problem that I’m obsessed with and started writing about in a book called A Clue to the Exit in the late 90s, and which I picked up again in Double Blind. That’s the other kind of prison I’m preoccupied by. A much more impersonal prison than the Melroses, but one in which I think we’re all trapped.
Are you currently trapped in your personal life?
No, writing the Melrose novels has left me much more detached. It’s a luxury to have lost interest in my personal life and to be much more fascinated by the questions that I’m now writing about.
Double Blind is a very different kind of book?
In some ways yes, but there are also continuities. Along with there having to be a jailbreak, for me to do something as difficult and anxious-making as write a novel there has also to be the feeling that whatever I’m doing, the subject is almost impossible or audacious or ill-advised to take on. And I have to be finding out something I don’t already know, otherwise I might as well be telling someone over a cup of coffee. I suppose Double Blind is more of a novel of ideas than I have written previously, although the ideas are fully integrated into the fictional lives of the characters. A novel of ideas not a strong English tradition. It is a much stronger European tradition, Mann, Kafka, Camus, Goethe, Diderot, etc.
Are you saying in Double Blind that the double-blind scientific approach does not hold?
The method is not applicable across the board, even within science, let alone within life. The ‘merely anecdotal’ is one of the favourite targets of scientific contempt, and yet If you are an astronomer looking at a quasar through a telescope, you can’t have a second quasar that’s not being looked at so as to form a ‘control group’. The resulting evidence is a celestial anecdote. Science is a subset of experience, not the other way around.
This problem of not being able to describe consciousness, and not being able to describe identity within science, and yet science claiming to be the most authoritative description we have of reality, seems to me a very serious one. It disturbs me. That’s what my current work is looking into, and if it takes a while for people to get interested in it, well, that’s happened to me before. Never Mind was published was in 1992 and Mother’s Milk was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for 2006. I had at least 14 years of total obscurity. I hope people will come around to the Double Blind series as they eventually did to the Melroses.
When you can do you read other contemporary writers?
I don’t read contemporary fiction because it often either intimidates me or annoys me and neither response is useful. I read novels written by my friends, because they’re my friends. I’ve read a lot of science books because of Double Blind and its sequel, and I sometimes read or re-read writers who are safely dead and incontrovertibly great. The writers who have had a big influence on me is a very obvious list of great stylists: Joyce, Proust, Flaubert, Beckett, Henry James, Nabokov, etc Some of them I haven’t read for a very long time, but they remain my guiding stars.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Edward St Aubyn: 'I never read things about myself because I’m so easily crushed'
This article is more than 4 years old
Hadley Freeman
The novelist on trying to escape Patrick Melrose, recovering from long Covid and putting to rest rumours that he wrote the eulogy for Princess Diana
Hadley Freeman
Sat 20 Mar 2021 07.00 EDT
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Most interviews in the lockdown era are conducted by video, but the novelist Edward St Aubyn and I are talking by old-fashioned telephone because, his publicist warns me beforehand, “Teddy doesn’t do Zoom.” Of course he doesn’t. In truth, it’s a surprise that Teddy does telephones, because he often gives the impression that his presence in prosaic 21st-century London – as opposed to early 20th-century Russia alongside his great-uncle Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, or 19th-century Britain with his great-grandfather, the Liberal MP Sir John St Aubyn, first Baron St Levan – is an administrative error shortly to be rectified.
His novels satirise the foibles of the world around him with the savagery of a true insider, such as when he takes on the petty snobberies of social climbers, and the bemusement of one who finds the modern world a frequent source of frustration. Mother’s Milk – the fourth book in his Patrick Melrose series – was nominated for the Booker prize in 2006; it didn’t win, but he metabolised the experience into 2014’s Lost for Words, in which he described literary prize-givings with the horrified amusement of an alien gazing upon bizarre human rituals. (Alas, not even mockery could save him from being subjected to such indignities again: Lost for Words won the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.)
His accent out-poshes the royal family: “house” is “hice”, “haven’t” is “huffn’t”, as in “I huffn’t got a second hice to escape to,” which he says to me, twice, when discussing his experience of lockdown. He says this with the wistfulness of one who lives in a milieu in which multiple homes are the norm, but also with the self-mockery of a man burdened with the kind of painful self-awareness not usually associated with his class. Judging purely from his background (aristocratic) and schooling (Westminster, Oxford), St Aubyn should be a paragon of privilege. But appearances are deceptive. He has a habit of hesitancy that I initially mistake for aloofness but turns out to be anxiety: “I’m always so nervous in interviews because I assume I’m going to make a fool out of myself. It’s odd, it hasn’t got any better since we last spoke. Yah! You would have thought that my paranoia would get eroded over time, but it remains defiant,” he says with an embarrassed laugh.
This is the second time I have interviewed St Aubyn, and although he sweetly pretends to remember our encounter 14 years ago (“But of course!”), he didn’t read the interview. “I never read things about myself. Not because I’m so lofty – on the contrary, it’s because I’m so easily crushed,” he says, and I believe him. Behind the plaster prestige is a fragile core that he works very hard to stabilise. He used to do this by alternately injecting speed and heroin, but he’s been clean since 1988 and so now relies on coffee “to try to be intelligent” followed by beta blockers “which then make me feel stupid”, he sighs.
Benedict Cumberbatch in a scene from Patrick Melrose.
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Benedict Cumberbatch in a scene from Patrick Melrose. Photograph: Ollie Upton/AP
His novels have a similar push and pull dynamic. Alongside the outwardly directed satire, the writing plunges inwards and excavates wounds, not least in the Melrose books, in which he fictionalised his own life, from being sexually abused by his father, to extreme drug addiction in his 20s, to anxious but loving fatherhood (St Aubyn has two children from previous relationships). But his books are not navel-gazing and the perspective often swoops between the characters, creating a mosaic of voices.
“That’s probably due to the disastrous plasticity of my personality, which was once completely shattered,” he says. He depicts this shattering in Bad News, the second Melrose book, in which Patrick, strung out on drugs, is tormented by dozens of internal voices. “I glued myself together again, but some of that plasticity is still there, and I do slip into the characters and feel like I’m hearing what they’re saying. There are levels of excitement in that: I can become molten.”
St Aubyn is talking to me from his home in west London, hiding in the smallest room in the house, “because tree surgeons are amputating the beautiful branches I look at from my bedroom. So rather than be caught choking with tears, I’ve moved upstairs to avoid the chainsaws,” he says. Even aside from the truncation of his tree, he is especially nervous today because he is promoting (“defending”, as he puts it) his new novel, Double Blind, which he sweated over for seven years. “There’s a danger of my other books getting ignored because the five Melroses have such a gravitational field to them. I knew Lost for Words and Dunbar wouldn’t achieve escape velocity from Planet Melrose,” he says, referring to the books he’s written since publishing the final part of the Melrose series, At Last, in 2012. “But I hope that Double Blind will.”
I hope so too. Writing about his past helped to free St Aubyn from it emotionally, but he did it so well that he doomed himself to being asked about it forever by journalists and fans, especially since 2018, when the Melrose books were turned into a series for Sky Atlantic, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and written by David Nicholls. When I ask one too many questions about Planet Melrose and its connections to his past, St Aubyn gently reminds me he’s been talking about all this since 1994, so would be ever so grateful if people occasionally asked him about something else. “But I totally understand Melrose has to be acknowledged, so please don’t delete your next five questions,” he says, as I delete my next five questions.
When he was eight he told his father to stop assaulting him, and he did: 'It was a short speech. But it changed the world'
Yet the awkward truth is that his non-Melrose, non-autobiographical books, and Double Blind is his fifth, have not found as much favour with readers and critics, and despite avoiding reviews, St Aubyn knows this. When I mention that I’ve read On the Edge and A Clue to the Exit, his first two non-Melrose books, he almost shouts in shock: “Oh my God! Well now I know of four people who have read them.”
Double Blind is a book of big ideas, in which the characters experiment with medicine, psychology, narcotics, religion and meditation to understand themselves and find peace. But as cerebral as the book is, it is also deeply felt, because St Aubyn has been thinking about these issues for decades. He tells me several times that Double Blind is very different from the Melrose books, and it is, but all of St Aubyn’s books are ultimately about the desire to break beyond the prison of one’s own subjectivity. He once described his mind as “a nest of scorpions” and the only drugs he feels nostalgia for – and he writes about them fondly in Double Blind – are “ones from the psychedelic realm, because they’re the quickest way to dissolve the subject/object division: you imagine the racing heart of the bird on the branch and you flow into the bird and the bird flows into you,” he trails off wistfully. These days, instead, he flows into his novels’ characters and the characters flow into him.
A desire to escape oneself begins with a desire to escape unhappiness. “Obviously if you think: ‘It’s absolutely great being me and there’s no room for improvement’” – he laughs at the thought – “then there’s little incentive. But that’s not been my problem.” His books stare hard at his deepest fears and dearest longings: “It isn’t worth writing a novel unless you’re saying what you assume is impossible to express,” he says.
St Aubyn grew up in London and France. His mother, Lorna, was an American heiress whose maternal skills he describes as “incompetent”, and his father, Roger, was a frustrated musician and a rapist. The first time he raped his son, St Aubyn was five years old. He describes this in Never Mind, the first Melrose book, and young Patrick imagines he is a gecko climbing the wall, “watching with detachment the punishment inflicted by the strange man on a small boy”. Patrick’s sense of self shatters, and in Double Blind St Aubyn looks into the connection between childhood abuse and schizophrenia. His father continued to abuse him for years.
As a child, St Aubyn dreamed of being the prime minister, “now rather a discredited ambition”, because he wanted to make speeches that would change the world. “I suppose that has an obvious psychological origin, in that I so much wanted to persuade everyone around me to behave radically differently,” he says. When he realised he had “a mortal terror of speaking in public”, he focused instead on writing. But he did make one monumental speech: when he was eight he told his father to stop assaulting him, and he did. “It was a short speech. But it changed the world,” he says.
It has long been rumoured that St Aubyn wrote another world-stopping speech: the eulogy read by his friend Charles Spencer at his sister Princess Diana’s funeral.
“Absolutely not, and I’m really bored on Charlie’s behalf that that rumour has gone around. He’s an excellent writer, he didn’t need me to write that speech,” St Aubyn says, and for the first time I catch a glimpse of something close to the imperiousness of his class.
Being admiring is always a sign of strength, whereas other people feel they’re losing something if they admire someone else
Most of St Aubyn’s books include a thank you to the writer Francis Wyndham, who died in 2017 and was one of many quasi-paternal figures in his life. “I think inevitably someone like me who had an unsatisfactory relationship with their father will look for benign adults who do things normal fathers do,” he says. Other father figures included the director Mike Nichols and the artist Lucian Freud, and the quality that united them was their “unalloyed support and enthusiasm” for St Aubyn (his own father, of course, gave him neither). “Being admiring is always a sign of strength, whereas other people feel they’re losing something if they admire someone else,” he says.
One person who perhaps demonstrates the latter tendency is St Aubyn’s former friend, Will Self. The two knew one another at university and shared a similar taste for drugs, but grew apart. In Self’s 2018 memoir, Will, he writes about a man called “Caius” who bears an unmistakeable resemblance to St Aubyn. When Caius eventually tells him that his father sexually abused him, Self’s response is to sulk: “[Caius] got everything, whether they be material things and even these extreme experiences, which, self-annihilatory or not, would undoubtedly make good copy.”
Did St Aubyn read the book?
“No, but there was a very mysterious period of my life when people were making bleak allusions to Will Self and raising their eyebrows at me, and I had no idea why,” he says with a mischievous chuckle. “Then somebody told me the fuller story. He wrote something nasty about me in – it’s an autobiography, isn’t it?”
I tell him that it was the most bizarrely bitter thing I’d ever read.
“What a pity. He’s an odd person. I think he’s very unhappy and I’m sorry about that, but he certainly doesn’t go to any trouble to disguise it,” he says.
St Aubyn is currently enduring the enervating effects of long Covid, “which have certainly gone on long enough for me”, yet our conversation continues long past our allotted time slot, and the more we talk, the less anxious he sounds. Before I leave him to recuperate I ask why his parents gave him the cuddly nickname “Teddy”, given how uncuddly they were. “It came about because the ancestor I’m named after was known as Teddy, so there was that. It is a cuddly name but it’s not a guarantee of cuddliness: Teddy Roosevelt used to go off shooting elephants! But I hope I make the grade,” he says, and he makes another self-mocking laugh, but this time it’s shot through with something that sounds almost like optimism.
Double Blind is published by Harvill Secker (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply,
In Life And Fiction, Edward St. Aubyn Sheds The Weight Of His Past
May 18, 20182:21 PM ET
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In Life And Fiction, Edward St. Aubyn Sheds The Weight Of His Past
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In Life And Fiction, Edward St. Aubyn Sheds The Weight Of His Past
St. Aubyn's semi-autobiographical novels featuring Patrick Melrose, an Englishman from a posh but monstrous family, are now the basis of a Showtime miniseries. Originally broadcast May 20, 2014.
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DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli in for Terry Gross. Our next guest is Edward St. Aubyn, best known for his quintet of semi-autobiographical novels known collectively as the Patrick Melrose Books, books that have just been made into a Showtime miniseries. The title character and the author share many key traits. Both hail from an upper-class British family that was posh but monstrous, and both as boys were sexually abused by their fathers.
In the Showtime version of "Patrick Melrose" - Part 2 is televised Saturday night - Benedict Cumberbatch plays the title character now in his 20s. He's a drug addict haunted by memories of his childhood and his father. Here's a clip from the opening episode in the miniseries. Patrick's father has just died, and after a particularly emotional and destructive stay at a New York hotel, Patrick phones overseas to check in with a friend.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "PATRICK MELROSE")
BENEDICT CUMBERBATCH: (As Patrick Melrose) Johnny. Johnny. Can you help me?
PRASANNA PUWANARAJAH: (As Johnny Hall) Patrick, how are you?
CUMBERBATCH: (As Patrick Melrose) Oh, fine. I tried to kill myself last night.
PUWANARAJAH: (As Johnny Hall) Where are you calling from?
CUMBERBATCH: (As Patrick Melrose) The bottom.
PUWANARAJAH: (As Johnny Hall) Christ. You were right. Patrick, tell me when you land. I'll come and meet you.
CUMBERBATCH: (As Patrick Melrose) Look. I haven't got long. Can you hear me?
PUWANARAJAH: (As Johnny Hall) Yes.
CUMBERBATCH: (As Patrick Melrose) I've decided I'm going to take control of my life. I'm going to get clean. Hello, Johnny. Can you hear me?
PUWANARAJAH: (As Johnny Hall) Yes, I can. That's wonderful. But are you sure this time?
CUMBERBATCH: (As Patrick Melrose) Of course. People always make such a fuss about these things.
PUWANARAJAH: (As Johnny Hall) So what do you want to do, Patrick? Patrick, what are you going to do instead?
BIANCULLI: Terry Gross spoke with Edward St. Aubyn, author of the semi-autobiographical "Patrick Melrose" novels, in 2014.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)
TERRY GROSS, BYLINE: Let's talk about the "Patrick Melrose" novels. First of all, the character is from a family that has money passed on over the generations. It's a family that has, you know, a historic past. And I imagine your family was that way, too. Could you just give us a sense of what kind of historical background your family is from?
EDWARD ST. AUBYN: Well, on my father's side, I'm told we came over with the Norman Conquest and was part of that invasion. It's a family that's been in the same place for a long time. I don't know why that's considered a virtue, but in England, it is. And they still own land, which they were recorded as owning in the Domesday Book in 1087. The head of the family lives in a castle and has a title, all that kind of stuff.
GROSS: The head of your family - is someone - there's still a castle?
ST. AUBYN: Yeah. But I'm, you know, quite remote from all that. But that's the kind of family that it is. And I should say - sorry - I should add, on my mother's side, there's a different story, which is a story of American money made in the middle of the 19th century coming over to Europe in a very Henry James-ian way and marrying into European aristocracy. That kind of story. So those are the two types of background that I'm from.
GROSS: One of your characters in the first novel in the Patrick Melrose series, "Never Mind," the character Nancy, is thinking about the psychological impact of inherited wealth. (Reading) the raging desire to get rid of it and the raging desire to hang onto it, the demoralizing effect of already having what almost everyone else was sacrificing their precious lives to acquire, the more or less secret superiority and the more or less secret shame of being rich. Can you talk about the downside of that kind of legacy of money?
ST. AUBYN: Well, I think if - probably the simplest thing, since I know where you're equating from, is to continue reading the sentence, if you'll allow me.
GROSS: Sure.
ST. AUBYN: (Reading) Generating their characteristic disguises - the philanthropy solution, the alcoholic solution, the mask of eccentricity, the search for salvation in perfect taste, the defeated, the idle and the frivolous and their opponents, the standard bearers, all living in a world that the dense glitter of alternatives made it hard for love and work to penetrate.
And as we know, Freud famously said that love and work is what keeps us sane. So the downside side of the world being talked about, though, being thought about by Nancy is that it's very difficult for love and work to penetrate it.
GROSS: Love was very difficult in your family. The character of Patrick Melrose is raped by his father when he's 5, and that continues for several years. And my understanding is that that happened to you, too.
ST. AUBYN: Yes.
GROSS: I'm not going to ask you to read that scene, but there is also a scene that's very upsetting. It's not rape. But there's a scene where the father picks up Patrick by his ears and basically - and Patrick hates it when his father does that. But the father says, I'm going to drop you right away. Don't worry about it. It's going to be fine. And he doesn't. And Patrick feels like his ears are going to fall off, and it's just such a kind of petty act of sadism to do that to a child when you know the child's hurting. So you've got, like, the incredibly horrible thing - the act of rape. And just that more smaller thing - there's, like, picking him up by his ears. You must have asked yourself a million times. Why would a father do that to his son? Like, what could he possibly be thinking? Like, how deranged can he be to do that?
ST. AUBYN: So that was a prominent question in my mind for many years. That's right. Yes, that's in the build-up towards the rape. We just get a little foretaste of David Melrose's sadism, his trickery and his desire to transfer his immense, raging unhappiness to his son. I think that is the reason why my father was so sadistic - is that he had so much spare pain, you know, that he needed to get rid of it in other people.
GROSS: I imagine, as a 5-year-old, you had no comprehension of what was going on.
ST. AUBYN: No, I didn't. I didn't. But I knew that it was wrong. And I knew that it was bewildering and horrible. So, I mean, I understood some aspects of it very well. And I knew that I was desperate to not to remain in a body that was being treated like that. And during the rape scene, Patrick imagines himself leaving the bed and taking refuge in the body of a gecko, which then scuttles away over the tiles. And part of him, some fragment of him, is unviolated, but the rest of him is destroyed.
GROSS: Right after the rape, the father ask Patrick if he's hungry. And the father says, well, I'm starving. You really should eat more. You know, build up your strength. You know, then the father goes out to lunch. And at lunch, the father is thinking that perhaps he pushed his disdain for middle-class prudery a little too far.
(Reading) Even at the bar of the Calvary and Guards Club, one couldn't boast about homosexual-pedophiliac incest with any confidence of a favorable reception. Who could he tell that he had raped his 5-year-old son?
Do you think, first of all, that your father's raping of you had anything to do with his disdain for middle-class prudery?
ST. AUBYN: I think that the people who behave in ways which are very destructive, immoral, which they they know to be wrong, search for whatever excuses, pretexts and lies that are available to them. And someone like David Melrose will naturally choose to regard the disapproval that most people would feel about what he does as middle-class prudery. That's the defense available to him. Other people would use other defenses, other explanations, you know, about character formation or Ancient Greece or, you know, whatever. You know, or imagine that the victims are really enjoying it all. People tell themselves the craziest stories.
GROSS: He seems to, instead of feeling shame and horror at his own actions, to just be wishing that he could, like, talk about it with somebody, share the experience.
ST. AUBYN: I think he did. He's not literally imagining that he would like to sit at the bar of the Cavalry and Guards Club, He's just - he's realizing in his own contemptuous and snobbish way that he's gone quite far in it, that there is actually no one who he can tell about this. And David Melrose is a very isolated figure. And he turns - one of his successful transfusions is that he turns his son into a hugely isolated figure. And, you know, at the end of the chapter, you're talking about what you were talking about earlier where he's picked up by his ears. Patrick runs away and hides. And the chapter ends with the sentence - nobody can find me here, he thought. And then he thought, what if nobody can find me here?
GROSS: And apply that to your life.
ST. AUBYN: My own life. You know, I remained very isolated by similar experiences that I had and, you know, never told another human being the truth about my childhood until I was 25, when I made a suicide attempt and realized that I would succeed the next time if I didn't tell the truth.
BIANCULLI: Edward St. Aubyn, author of the Patrick Melrose novels, speaking to Terry Gross in 2014. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
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BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 2014 interview with Edward St. Aubyn, author of the semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novels. Both St. Aubyn and his character, Patrick Melrose, were raped by their fathers over the course of several years, starting at the age of 5.
GROSS: When you did reveal that you were raped as a child, what was your mother's reaction? Because she didn't know, right?
ST. AUBYN: She said she didn't know, that's right.
GROSS: But you don't necessarily believe her?
ST. AUBYN: Well, I do. I do because people have extraordinary capacities for compartmentalizing things and denying things, you know. And to some extent, this is the subject of the last book in the volume. It's one of the subjects. At last, Patrick has thought of his mother as a fellow victim of David Melrose's tyranny and violence, but he begins to wonder whether there was a collaborative element, perhaps not consciously but between her masochism and his sadism.
I think, you know, back in my life, I would say that I got a letter from an au pair who had looked after us as children after "Never Mind" was published saying that she'd heard me screaming down the corridor, and she knew something terrible was happening. But she was 19, and she was frightened of my father. And she never dared do anything about it. And she'd felt guilty all of our life. Well, none of the au pairs were able to to bear our household for more than a few months.
So if she knew, how could my mother, who there the whole time, not have known? There must have been, you know, some kind of split in her mind. But I don't deny that people can split their minds in that way. I don't mean that she really knew and was approving of it. I think she must have been in a position to know if she was prepared to acknowledge it.
GROSS: What was their reaction when she - when you told her she couldn't be in denial about it?
ST. AUBYN: She said that my father raped her as well and that she'd, you know, refused to go to bed with him after the birth of my sister. And then he'd raped her and that she was going to leave him but had become pregnant. And I was that pregnancy.
GROSS: You said that your novels, the Patrick Melrose novels, are really about how to become free and free of anger and resentment. And what Patrick Melrose learns at the end of the fifth novel I think I would describe as compassion for yourself, which sounds like a cliche but that is so hard to achieve. Is that something you feel like you've worked on for a long time?
ST. AUBYN: It's very hard to paraphrase the last chapter. And - but there are lots of elements in it. And that's what you described as one of them, yes. He renounces the search for consolation. So there's an element of stoicism and austerity in it. But he also discovers that, you know, as he's become less and less obstructed by hatred and resentment, that there is this kind of spontaneous generosity which is compared with, you know, with your hand going out to rub your knee if you just banged into something. It's just a spontaneous reassurance or comforting in it that he hasn't really known before, which is very, you know, natural to a lot of people.
But it - so there are all sorts of discoveries in the last novel. And they weren't discoveries that I'd made until I wrote the last chapter of the last novel. I wasn't looking back on some sort of, you know, little epiphanies, which I was going to share with the reader. I discovered what the resolution was in the act of writing it. And the - I wasn't looking back on anything. So the gap between, you know, the description of experience and the experience closed, and the gap between the author and the alter ego closed. I was discovering what Patrick was discovering in real time by writing it. So that up chapter is important to me, and I think it really just has to be read (laughing).
GROSS: Mm-hmm. What's an example of a book that you read when you were young that was really important to you?
ST. AUBYN: There was a book which I was given as a prize at the Lycee Francais, the French school in London, which I went to only for a year. And everyone got a prize, by the way, so it wasn't very distinguished. But there was one on your chair when you went to the prize (unintelligible). And I was very young at the time. It's about a goat who longs to escape into the hills because he can see the rot of alpine flowers that he longs to run around in. But his owner locks him in a woodshed because he knows there's a wolf up in the mountains. But he escapes from the woodshed and has an ecstatic day playing and rising in the high grass.
And then at the end of the day, he sees the shadow of the wolf on the ground, and he knows that he's going to die. But he turns towards the wolf and charges and decides to fight him with this phrase, which in French is (speaking French), but - as long as I last until the dawn. And that book just made me burst into tears every evening for a year or two of my life. So books always had this very powerful effect on me because of some communication, somebody seeming, even in a very symbolic or displaced way, to understand what I was feeling. And I think that's the miracle of literature - is this private communication between one intelligence and another.
GROSS: Edward St. Aubyn, thank you so much for talking with us.
ST. AUBYN: Thank you.
BIANCULLI: Edward St. Aubyn, author of "The Patrick Melrose Novels," speaking to Terry Gross in 2014. The second episode of the "Patrick Melrose" miniseries premieres tomorrow night on Showtime. Coming up, I review HBO's new TV movie adaptation of Ray Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451." This is FRESH AIR.
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St. Aubyn, Edward DUNBAR Hogarth/Crown (Adult Fiction) $25.00 10, 3 ISBN: 978-1-101-90428-2
A brilliant reworking of William Shakespeare's King Lear for our day.Henry Dunbar, bearing a proud Scottish name and lamenting declining fortunes and capacities, may or may not be "more sinn'd against than sinning." At the outset of St. Aubyn's (A Clue to the Exit, 2015, etc.) retelling, shuffling the order of the play, Lear is in a pricey English sanitarium, fuming that his hydra-headed business has been wrested from him: "They stole my empire and now they send me stinking lilies," he howls, with no one but a fool named Peter to listen to him. Peter reminds him sympathetically, singsong, that he might as well cheer up, since the next step is the narrow grave: "How lightly we have tripped down those stairs, like Fred Astaires, twirling a scythe instead of a cane!" As in the original play, Dunbar is a sputtering font of righteous rage, indignant that daughters Abby and Megan have outmaneuvered him, incapable of separating out his "good" daughter, Florence, from all those he reckons have done him wrong; Florence, meanwhile, compounds his wrath by gladly living on her own out in the wilds of Wyoming, cut out of profits and out of the will. There's but one thing to do, Dunbar decides, and that's to bust out of psychiatric prison, go off the meds, and range the moorlands to work out a horrific realization: "there was no one else to blame for the treachery of everything; the horror, in the end, the horror was the way his mind worked." St. Aubyn uses the play as a guide more than a template at points, but the basic truth remains that the best of Shakespeare stands up readily to adaptation in every age, from West Side Story to Ran and Scotland, PA. St. Aubyn's recasting to make someone reminiscent of Rupert Murdoch at times, and perhaps Donald Trump at others, brings the Bard gracefully into our own day. A superb, assured reminder that as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods--and that ain't good.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
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"St. Aubyn, Edward: DUNBAR." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2017. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A498345288/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0ac5488b. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
Dunbar
by Edward St Aubyn
Hogarth, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 211
When millionaires become billionaires they become even greedier and more ruthless. At the highest level, Trumpian economics can be lethal. Edward St Aubyn, in his powerful new novel Dunbar, applies the oxyacetylene brilliance and cauterisation of his prose to bear on the tragic endgame of a family's internecine struggle for control of a global fortune. St Aubyn is a connoisseur of depravity, yet also shows he cherishes the possibility of redemption.
Henry Dunbar is an 80-year-old Canadian mogul who founded and developed the world's second-most influential media conglomerate. His older daughters, Abigail and Megan, want the wealth and power; his youngest daughter, Florence, wants only his love. The rivalry is freakishly intense, but one can endure the horrors and enjoy the author's stylish craftsmanship.
At first the old man's situation seems terminally dire. The diabolically acquisitive daughters have bribed his personal physician to commit him to a supposedly secure psychiatric hospital in the Lake District. Demented and further confused by drugs, Dunbar has been incapacitated so that he should be unable to resist the final quashing of his authority by a hostile takeover at an imminent board meeting in New York. Surprisingly, however, Dunbar's hospital roommate, Peter Walker, an alcoholic comedian with a multifaceted personality disorder and voices to match, proves to be providentially sympathetic and resourceful.
'I really did have an empire, you know,' said Dunbar. 'Have I ever told you the story of how it was stolen from me?'
'Many times, old man, many times,' said Peter dreamily, who is moved not to achieve justice in big business but to contrive their escape to the nearest bar. Dunbar, as instructed, spits out his medication and follows Walker out through the kitchen's back door. They find a vehicle suitable for rugged terrain, with the ignition key conveniently in place. Dunbar's captors have confiscated all his credit cards, except one he managed to hide, a card for a Swiss account with unlimited credit. The alcoholic, having served his narrative function, is recaptured and kills himself. Dunbar is then free for a lonely, dangerous escape in the snow, pursued by hospital guards.
Dunbar is saved from frostbite and collapse by a tramp, a defrocked vicar who was ruined by Dunbar's newspapers. 'When he had been running a global empire, his cruelty and his vindictiveness and his lies and his tantrums were disguised as the necessary actions of a decisive commander-in-chief, but in his current naked condition the naked character of these actions screamed at him, like ex-prisoners recognising their torturer in the street.' An Aubynesque simile can brighten a grey passage: 'A gaudy sunset, like a drunken farewell scrawled in lipstick on a mirror.'
But the overall focus, satisfactorily, is on contemporary social pathology and Dunbar's moral transcendence. Most of the novel is harsh; all of it is entertaining.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
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Catling, Patrick Skene. "Harsh, but entertaining." Spectator, vol. 335, no. 9865, 23 Sept. 2017, p. 30. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A524611554/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=13b31530. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
DUNBAR
Edward St. Aubyn
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The Hogarth Shakespeare project, for which the Bard's plays are "re-imagined" into novels by renowned authors, has been beyond sharp in its pairings so far. But none is as inspired as turning loose Edward St. Aubyn, chronicler of upper-class British depravity, on King Lear. St. Aubyn, 57, has written five novels about the Melroses, a fictionalized version of his own wealthy family, openly portraying how he was raped repeatedly by his father between the ages of five and eight, his ineffectual mother, his prodigious youthful drug abuse and suicide attempts. What makes the novels art is not the horrific origin story, though, but their meld of suffering and corrosive social comedy-nightmares filtered through an Evelyn Waugh lens. And whether it's personal history or Shakespeare's dramatic power that form the root of his literary obsession, critics have noted that St. Aubyn often references Lear in his work and conversation.
The novelist doesn't disappoint in Dunbar, in either familial vivisection or the blackest comedy, the latter primarily involving its title character's elder daughters, Abigail and Megan, more vicious and far funnier than Goneril and Regan. Henry Dunbar, an egomaniacal media mogul with a Scottish name and Canadian (read colonial) roots, brings to mind historical figures from Toronto-born Lord Thomson of Fleet to Australian Rupert Murdoch to a hint of Donald Trump, whose mother hailed from the Hebrides. While Peter Walker-a severely alcoholic comedian jugged up in the same high-end sanatorium as Dunbar-is not as wise a fool as Shakespeare's, he is just as antic: "Decadence, decay and death," he chants, "how lightly we have tripped down those stairs, like Fred Astaires, twirling a scythe instead of a cane!"
After days of secretly spitting out their meds, Dunbar and Walker escape into England's rugged Lake District, the latter in pursuit of booze, the former in an attempt to recapture his crown-that is, control of his corporate empire-and reconcile with his youngest daughter, Florence, the only one who actually loves him. Throughout Dunbar's struggle on the stormy heath, interspersed with brilliant skewering of privilege, a reader can see both the tragedy of Shakespeare's old man-who "but ever slenderly knew himself"-and hints of the journey to self-awareness that must once have saved a much younger St. Aubyn. BRIAN BETHUNE
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 St. Joseph Media
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Bethune, Brian. "Dunbar." Maclean's, vol. 130, no. 9, Oct. 2017, p. 77. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A504341146/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=6a7e7a7c. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
DUNBAR By Edward St. Aubyn 244 pp. Hogarth. $25.
The Hogarth Press series of contemporary reimaginings of Shakespeare's plays is a venerable conceit as old as the playwright himself, that notorious magpie of usable plot. So it is that theft, or call it transformative mimicry, is the free-wheeling charge the British writer Edward St. Aubyn must confront in clothing ''King Lear'' in modern dress. Easy enough for knights and their steeds to turn up as helicopters and corporate jets, and easy too for irascible media emperor Henry Dunbar and his rivalrous deputies to stand in for contentious king and court. Easier still is the one-on-one exchange of Lear's three daughters for Dunbar's refurbished trio; Goneril and Regan, renamed Abigail and Megan, remain avarice incarnate, while honest Cordelia flowers into compassionate Florence. Updated Shakespeare, then, is an ingenious matter of clever surrogates, and in this way plot purloined would seem to be the whole of it. How much of the figure of Lear is swiped from an older tale, and owed also to the biblical Job? Yet plot, as Hamlet knew, might be the least of it.
Here is the despotic Dunbar, confined by Abigail and Megan to a remote sanitarium, explaining to Peter Walker, a fellow inmate and former TV comic, how he came to surrender his company:
'' 'I told Wilson that I would stay on as nonexecutive chairman,' Dunbar began, 'keeping the plane, the entourage, the properties, and the appropriate privileges, but laying down ... the burden of running the Trust from day to day.'
'' 'But the Trust is everything,' Wilson told me.... 'If you give that away,' he said, 'you'll have nothing left'....
'' 'I told Wilson that it was a tax measure, that we could get around the inheritance tax by giving the girls the company straight away. 'Better pay the tax,' said Wilson, ''than disinherit yourself.'' '
'' 'I can do what I bloody well like!... I am informing you of my decision, not asking your advice. Just make it happen!' ''
And here is Lear, in like-minded obstinacy, when Kent, his loyal courtier, pleads with him to rethink what he has done in relinquishing his kingdom to two grasping and sycophantic daughters while disinheriting the true-hearted third:
Hear me, recreant! On thine allegiance, hear me!
Since thou hast sought to make us break our vow,
Which we durst never yet, and with strain'd pride
To come betwixt our sentence and our power,
Which nor our nature nor our place can bear,
Our potency made good, take thy reward. . . . if ...
Thy banished trunk be found in our dominions,
The moment is thy death. Away!
What? Preposterous, outrageous! Who dares to juxtapose Shakespearean verse with 21st-century vernacular? But take note: sameness rules nevertheless. Wilson is truly Kent, Kent is plainly Wilson. Kent is exiled, Wilson is fired, or, as we like to say, let go. Shakespearean language aside, this seductive Hogarthian mandate -- Lear retold in familiar idiom -- appears to be fulfilled, alchemized into the topical. And yes, language is here justly set aside; we are right to be indifferent to the sublime. Dunbar's tone, pedestrian even in anger, is of our time; it is ours, it is us. ''Dunbar,'' not unlike the play itself, turns out to be a thriller: a crime thriller, a corporate mega-mogul thriller and even, at least in one horrific scene, a sadistic thriller. Betrayals are betrayed, boardroom machinations proliferate, monstrous conspiracies beget more monstrousness.
Still, a cutting-edge cutthroat novel cannot be merely an acquiescent doppelgänger. For the sake of narrative speed and cinematic concision, it is compelled to jettison superfluous characters and an entire parallel story line: that of Gloucester, yet another father of wicked and favorable offspring. We can anyhow recognize who is derived from whom, plucked from one thread of Lear's predicament to serve another of Dunbar's. Dr. Bob, for instance, Abigail and Megan's willing confederate and the slavelike sexual partner of both sisters, stands in for Edmund, Gloucester's scheming bastard son; like Edmund, the doctor is secretly plotting usurpation. And among the most recognizable spinoffs is Peter, Dunbar's soused and mercurial sidekick, a feeble echo of Lear's Fool. Having engineered their escape from the drugs and rigors of Nurse Roberts, cowardly Peter abandons his muddled friend in wintry Cumbria, the isolated lake district of northwestern England -- Lear's wild and storm-ridden heath.
And now Dunbar, alone and lost and on the loose, must be pursued and again imprisoned, lest he somehow blunder his way toward undermining the crucial meeting that will determine the Dunbar empire's ultimate disposition. A takeover by a rival media conglomerate is an alarming possibility. To forestall so catastrophic an outcome, the miscreant sisters, already stymied by a tangle of treacheries, must prevent their distraught and remorseful father's meddling. But first, to learn of Dunbar's whereabouts, they will lure and torture Peter. Abigail will try to burn him alive, even as Dr. Bob looks on.
So much for the thriller's bursts of action, shock, suspense, unmitigated evil, blood-soaked reversals and the inevitable chase. Story! But in reconceiving Shakespeare, it isn't story that counts; the meaning of story is all. And it is through the Fool that it comes clear why plot, however resourcefully reconstituted, is, after all, the least of it.
Peter is an antic fellow, a drunken callow clown with a knack for celebrity impersonation -- a buffoon who becomes an easy victim. Though comic buffoons and yokels are scattered through a number of Shakespeare's tragedies, Lear's universe is relentlessly bleak, and the Fool, despite his jingling, is neither oaf nor jester. He is sometimes compared to a Greek chorus, that droning moan of dooming fatalism; but he is larger than this. His crooked prophetic cry is nearer at heart to the majestic voice of Job's God: he knows what he knows, and if fear, lust, rage, greed, deceit, domination, revulsion, hurt -- all the dire passions -- are portioned among the play's dramatis personae, only the Fool can weigh these all at once and put them in their puny place. Only the Fool can see the pity of it, and see it whole. And what is the meaning of this chronicle of a power-stripped maddened old king and the brutes who humble him, if not pity?
With one exception, ''Dunbar'' -- like the genre novel it mostly resembles -- keeps the story and loses the meaning. The exception is the long central passage where, as Dunbar wanders half-hallucinating in the Cumbrian wilderness, the only dialogue is between the mind and itself. A heartbreaking scrim of the broken and unspoken, image upon image, flames up:
''The broken layer of brown and purple cloud scattered in the yellowing sky reminded him of his mother's tortoiseshell comb when he used to close one eye and hold it up to the lamplight and stare at it for ages, until its mottled pattern of light and dark patches filled the whole visual field.... The hills, drenched by the storm, were gleaming and dripping in the afternoon light. How tactless of him to have insisted on bringing his lumbering body to this lovely, liquid scene, to dump it like a sack of cement, split open and hardened by rain, on this otherwise uncontaminated hillside.... The next thing that happened was that he forgot the last thing that happened.''
Here we can feel the writer feeling, and with Lawrentian clarity: a distillation of harrowed human pity. Retelling becomes reliving, a fleeting wisp of Shakespeare's elusive breath. All the rest, in the usual way of thriller fiction, is puppetry and plot.
CAPTION(S):
DRAWING (DRAWING BY JOHANNA WALDERDORFF)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
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Ozick, Cynthia. "An Old, Mad, Blind, Despised and Dying King." The New York Times Book Review, 29 Oct. 2017, p. 11(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A511892287/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0f01661c. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
St. Aubyn, Edward DOUBLE BLIND Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Fiction None) $26.00 6, 1 ISBN: 978-0-374-28219-6
St. Aubyn moves on from a troubled King Lear type (Dunbar, 2017) to characters with greater problems still concerning life, death, and figuring out how much caviar and cocaine are enough.
This is a novel of ideas—more specifically, the idea that somehow the world can be saved, whether through rewilding a patch of English forest or employing virtual reality to battle schizophrenia. Everyone involved represents an aspect of mind, from Sebastian, a young man battling mental illness, to Lucy, a principal player who has a frightening encounter with a tumor. Her sympathetic surgeon is of help: When Lucy, brilliant at both science and business, asks if she should avoid any kind of activity, given her condition, he replies, “My only advice is not to drink a case of champagne and go swimming at night in shark-infested waters.” That’s good advice under any circumstances. Lucy swims in the sharky waters of venture capital, working for a man suggestively named Hunter Sterling, who uses his brain and infinite fortune both to execute forward-looking mergers and acquisitions and to explore just about every narcotic there is, a habit that opens the way for moments of bad personal judgment and vulnerability, as when a greedy associate, urged by his wife and sensing the boss’s addictive behavior, tries to engineer a financial coup: “Money had turned his nervously cheerful, basically shy, nerd of a wife into Lady Macbeth.” Even the pure-hearted, ecological character called Francis—think Assisi, which figures in St. Aubyn’s elegant, carefully plotted tale—isn’t above the human fray; he’s ostensibly the faithful lover of Olivia, Lucy’s best friend, but he gets tangled up with a rich investor, which gives the story a bit of erotic frisson and some attention to our vile bodies just at a time when the characters are exploring the higher mysteries of the mind. More humorous but just as intellectually inclined as Richard Powers and David Mitchell, among other contemporaries, St. Aubyn explores human foibles even as he brilliantly takes up headier issues of the human brain in sickness and in health.
A thought-provoking, smartly told story that brings philosophy, medicine, and neuroscience into boardroom and bedroom.
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"St. Aubyn, Edward: DOUBLE BLIND." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Feb. 2021. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A650107689/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c672be66. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
Edward St. Aubyn. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $26 (256p) ISBN 978-0-374-90275-9
St. Aubyn (the Patrick Melrose novels) expounds on epigenetics, rewilding, art, neuroscience, and philosophy in this sublime character-driven novel. With his usual elegant prose, St. Aubyn follows three friends--Francis, Olivia, and Lucy--through a transformative year. Naturalist Francis meets biologist Olivia at a "megafauna" conference in Oxford and feels an instant "subterranean attraction." He later anxiously awaits her visit to the Sussex estate he has vowed to reclaim with its deer, pigs, cattle, and ponies, envisioning an "English savannah." Meanwhile, Olivia anticipates Lucy's arrival from New York to London, where she's taken a job with a venture capital firm headed by the scheming Hunter Sterling. Lucy's also blindsided by unexplainable muscle spasms that lead to the "high tech phrenology" of a graphically detailed brain biopsy. While she is recovering with Francis and Olivia in Sussex, Hunter helicopters in with caviar, blinis, and vodka. Add the sudden, unexpected appearance of 34-year-old schizophrenic Sebastian Tanner, whose true identity threatens to square the friends' already fraught triangle and lends an element of mystery. The four embark on a pharmacologically fueled journey from England to Cap d'Antibes to Big Sur, leading to a surprising and enthralling moral and ethical dilemma. St. Aubyn brings off a seemingly effortless and provocative examination of the mind and its refractions. This one's not to be missed. (June)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 PWxyz, LLC
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"Double Blind." Publishers Weekly, vol. 268, no. 11, 15 Mar. 2021, p. 44. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A655835308/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4f32eb48. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
Double Blind
Edward St Aubyn
Harvill Seeker, 256pp. 18.99[pound sterling]
In Ian McEwan's 1987 novel The Child in Time, Stephen, a children's author, is rebuked by his scientist friend Thelma for his lack of interest in theoretical physics. "Shakespeare would have grasped wave functions, Donne would have understood complementarity and relative time," she chides him. "But you 'arts' people, you're not only ignorant of these magnificent things, you're rather proud of knowing nothing." She laughs at him for imagining modernism--"modernism!"--is anything more than a "passing local fashion" compared to the wonders of modern science.
It is a position with which McEwan clearly has some sympathy--Enduring Love (1997), Saturday (2005) and Solar (2010) are intensely interested in psychiatry, neuroscience and climate science respectively, though not so much in modernism. In his tenth novel, Edward St Aubyn is similarly determined to show that he has diligently digested a decade's worth of Nature journal. Double Blind is a cerebral, large-canvas novel about a loose group of upper-class friends engaged in neuroscience, genetics and ecology. It seems to offer a riposte to Thelma's arguments, 34 years later.
At the novel's heart is a touchy defence of Freudian psychoanalysis--which of course formed the subsoil from which that "passing local fashion" for modernism grew, and which St Aubyn feels has been unfairly maligned by hard-science types. St Aubyn himself went through years of psychoanalysis, as did his most famous character, Patrick Melrose, who is raped at the age of five by his father in Never Mind (1992), the first novel in the Melrose quintet. It's no coincidence that Patrick's best friend is a psychoanalyst, nor that the characters who express cynicism towards the practice are usually the most loathsome.
Throughout Double Blind, there is a distinct thread of nostalgia for the "anecdotal end of science"--for science as a gentlemanly business of simile and symbolism, language and narrative. There are two scientists of this sort at the novel's heart. One is the avuncular psychoanalyst, Martin Carr, who is frustrated by the limitation of modern approaches to schizophrenia, which lean too much on anti-psychotic drugs. We see these problems manifest in his patient, a young, working-class man called Sebastian, who suffers violent episodes of mental illness but who benefits from Martin's attentiveness to his disordered language.
The novel's hero, though, is Martin's prospective son-in-law, Francis, a philosophically minded, mid-30-something naturalist, who is working to rewild the private land of some enlightened aristocrats. Francis's quiet wisdom, big-brain and "impressive calm" in the kitchen have charmed Martin's adopted daughter, Olivia, a biologist writing a book about epigenetics. Her best friend from Oxford University, Lucy, has been head-hunted by an ex-hedge-funder Hunter Sterling, who wants her to run his new venture capital firm, Digitas. Hunter--a Westminster School alumnus with a raging drug habit--has made investments in biotech, AI and robotics, but also wants to get into philanthropy. "For a man as rich as him to show his face in society without a Foundation would be like a construction worker not having a hard hat on a building site," writes St Aubyn--and that's one of the novel's better similes.
As Double Blind veers between jet-setting farce and musings on recent issues of Current Biology, it soon becomes clear that St Aubyn's main objective is to critique the exalted position of hard science--using his characters as mouthpieces. Martin's pet peeve is that hard science denigrates the "fanciful realm of emotion ... symbolic language, psychological conditioning and cultural context" in favour of "the proper objects of scientific enquiry: brain mapping and biochemistry". As the novel's title suggests, St Aubyn has some beef with funding, peer review, publication and the randomised double-blind placebo control trial, an experiment in which both doctor and patients are unaware whom has been given a placebo and whom the real drug. This model has long been held up as the "gold standard" of scientific research as it supposedly eliminates bias. However, those who thrive within this culture, argues St Aubyn, are no less biased or corrupted than the "arts" people; they are "rotten by their own 'double blind' standards".
Ask many scientists and they will complain about the shortcomings of academic publishing, funding models and so on. But is corruption as endemic as St Aubyn seems to think it is? I'm not so sure--and St Aubyn isn't the writer I'd trust to explore it anyway. He seems too nostalgic for the days when science was just about viable as an aristocratic leisure pursuit.
To make his case, he repeatedly returns to the importance of "symbolic language" and how scientists don't understand metaphor. All except our hero, Francis. As he ponders the nature of awareness, he reflects on how his own mind "continually generated metaphors to remind himself of a natural state that should have come, well, more naturally, but in his case, came with a caravan of similes and arguments". It's a peculiar line of argument (as well as a peculiar metaphor). Science is hardly devoid of symbolic language. I do not pretend to understand string theory, but I assume that it involves metaphorical rather than literal string. The irony of St Aubyn's defence of symbolic language, though, is that his own metaphors and similes are howlingly bad.
At one point, Francis compares "Occam's Razor, the minimalist aesthetic that was supposed to adjudicate over intellectual life for the rest of time" to "a fashion editor in a black pencil skirt who simply refuses to retire, decade after decade, despite the screams of protest from an art department longing for a little moment of baroque excess and a splash of colour". I'm sorry, what? When Lucy discovers, a few days into her new job, that she has a brain tumour, she thinks it's "like being raped while you're in a coma and only finding out when you see the CCTV footage". Is it really? Must we imagine the uncommon horror of being raped in a coma to appreciate the shock of being diagnosed with a brain tumour? I began to flinch every time I saw the word "like".
In the spirit of scientific enquiry, I reached for the Melrose books to run the same test again. St Aubyn's best similes are exhilarating in their precision. "Dull, dissolute, and obscure [club] members felt buoyed up by this atmosphere of power, as little dinghies bob up and down on their moorings when a big yacht sails out of the harbour they have shared." Vodka cracks ice in a glass, "like a spine in the hands of a confident osteopath". However, many others feel lazy. A pompous, overweight man looks "like a hippopotamus with hypertension". When David Melrose is drugged, "The armchair felt like a cheese fondue."
St Aubyn has said that he can have "20 or 30 goes" at a sentence before it's any good--except dialogue, which comes more naturally. I don't believe he has had 20 or 30 goes at any sentence in Double Blind. And I wish he had gone several more rounds with his dialogue, which feels stagy and forced, like a Tom Stoppard play reworked by Dan Brown. In one scene, Hunter arrives unannounced at Francis's cottage by helicopter and, over a caviar lunch, Olivia compares the "circular" arguments of scientists trying to prove the genetic causes of schizophrenia as "like a wagon formation protecting beleaguered dogma". Olivia, Lucy and Francis may have zeitgeisty concerns--rewilding, psychedelics, epigenetics--but none of them sound like any mid-30-somethings around today. The women, supposedly great scientific minds, aren't allowed do anything with them; they seem little different to the Alice-band-wearing Sloanes and predatory vixens St Aubyn depicts in the Melrose series. In fact, the whole novel has a peculiar late-Eighties atmosphere.
The most natural and affecting interactions are between Martin and his patient Sebastian. We are reminded that St Aubyn is at his best when he's exploring deep psychological pain. But for much of the novel, it feels as if he is hiding behind a wall of intellectual discourse. Consequences rarely carry from one chapter to the next. Tension dissipates. If emotions, anecdote, psychology and narrative are so important, where are the deeper registers of empathy and pathos that made the Melrose novels so rich and memorable? As it is, Double Blind fails to convince either on the science or on the human drama. Maybe Thelma had a point.
Caption: Lost in translation: St Aubyn's defence of "symbolic language" is plagued by bad similes
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Thomas-Corr, Johanna. "Science and its discontents: A novelist's clumsy critique of the new rationalism." New Statesman, vol. 150, no. 5612-5614, 26 Mar. 2021, pp. 78+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A658123901/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=09b895a8. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
DOUBLE BLINDBy Edward St. Aubyn
More than most novelists, Edward St. Aubyn seems chained to his biography. His justly celebrated Patrick Melrose novels alchemized horrific experience -- St. Aubyn's repeated rape by his sadist father during childhood -- into incisive fictions through which the author wrote his way out of (de)formative trauma. Whenever St. Aubyn has strayed beyond the scathing upper-class satire and moral searching of the Melrose series, though, the results have been markedly less well loved.
''Double Blind'' sees St. Aubyn strike out for unfamiliar territory -- science, ecology and venture capital. It is distinctly the product of a mind processing some very big data. As in the Melrose novels, lusty descriptions of drug use pepper insights on the lives of the rich, the satire spiced with characteristically zestful metaphor. That said, the flaws are considerable. ''Double Blind'' is an often cluttered work crying out for tighter narrative control and thematic unity. Two-thirds of the way through, I still had the impression of a throng of subplots in search of a story.
A mellower affair than the precision-strike vengeances of the Melrose series, ''Double Blind'' follows a cast of well-to-do characters over a period in which multiple strands -- illness, romance, pregnancy, research, investment, psychopathology -- entangle them in fictively expedient ways. Francis is a 30-something botanist living off-grid on a rewilding reserve named Howorth. As he falls in love with a biologist named Olivia, her best friend, Lucy, begins working for Hunter Sterling, a billionaire alpha-philanthropist who lives in Big Sur on a ranch he calls Apocalypse Now. The book's most entertaining character, Hunter is rarely seen without a crack pipe, pill, bottle of bourbon or line of coke. (Having beaten the addictions he explored in novels like ''Bad News,'' St. Aubyn can still write a tasty freebasing scene.) Hunter is set to finance a bleeding-edge virtual reality device that mimics the exalted inner states of saints and mystics. Meanwhile, Olivia's psychoanalyst father begins treating a young schizophrenic whose bizarre lingual associations contain coded, plot-furthering truths.
The breadth and density of scientific knowledge crammed into ''Double Blind'' can make for hard going, and the material does not always fit naturally into the novel's social-realist structure. Francis is a somewhat disembodied vessel for ruminations on everything from the hard problem of consciousness, to quantum physics, to research into treating depression with psychedelic mushrooms. When the appearance of the sexually charismatic Hope draws Francis' vital energies away from his brain and below the waist, it comes as a relief.
Snatches of inner monologue such as ''In the extreme case of 22q11.2 deletion syndrome there were 180 clinical associations'' are not uncommon, yet their accumulation builds to no particular thesis. On the plus side, St. Aubyn is rare among contemporary novelists in being imaginatively engaged with psychoanalysis; the dramatized treatment of a young man on the far shores of psychosis stands out amid the lashings of lab talk and research riffs.
For all the promiscuous surveying of contemporary scientific thought, St. Aubyn is at heart a very English traditionalist of the social novel, and ''Double Blind'' is most satisfying when the big ideas make room for depictions of intimacy, professional striving, family, hedonistic appetite and sexual confusion. The scenes of broad satire -- not least the one in which a Vatican emissary gets unwittingly high on MDMA while Kraftwerk performs at a private party -- generally hit their targets, even if some of them are sitting ducks. St. Aubyn must resent it when readers confess they are only really passionate about his Melrose books, yet there's no getting around it: While commendable in its intellectual ambition, ''Double Blind'' fumbles in its delivery.
Rob Doyle is the author, most recently, of ''Threshold.'' DOUBLE BLIND By Edward St. Aubyn 239 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.
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Doyle, Rob. "Mind Games." The New York Times Book Review, 27 June 2021, p. 16(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A666548107/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fd106453. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
The great achievement of Edward St Aubyn's literary career is to have brokered a merger between two vast, international and mutually hostile enterprises, the English comic novel and the more continental tradition of psychological realism. This might have been a doomed venture, involving the acquaintance of two largely incompatible balance sheets: the English offering of alliteratively named side-characters, wearisome verbal gags and frothy plot contortions, compelled to rub up against steppe-borne existentialists, conscience-wracked breakdowns and appeals to the Almighty. One imagines a beaming PG Wodehouse shaking the skeletal hand of Fyodor Dostoevsky, or Kingsley Amis belching with laughter in the unstirring face of Samuel Beckett.
And yet, in his five Patrick Melrose novels, such a coupling, or consolidation, appears to have taken place. The series, published between 1993 and 2011, told a story of filial redemption, a wayward clambering from the abyss towards, if not tranquillity, then the "ordinary unhappiness" that Freud hoped for his patients. The first three, originally conceived as a trilogy, narrated Patrick Melrose's sexual abuse by his aristocratic father, his late-adolescent heroin addiction and his eventual surmounting of this primal trauma. After an interval in which St Aubyn published two other novels, he returned to Patrick's story in a fourth book, which focused on his relationship with his mother, a hyper-wealthy American who signs cheques for every charity while neglecting her son and enabling his abuse. The fifth and last book took in her death and funeral, and Patrick's final liberation.
The novels tell not just Patrick's life story but his creator's. St Aubyn shares Patrick's world of rarefied privilege (the ancestral baronetage was created by Charles II) and before he inflicted it upon his alter ego, he underwent the same abuse, addiction and recovery. And yet, striking as they are, the events and arc of Patrick's life are not what makes St Aubyn's novels sing--or indeed scream. Their unique effects are produced by describing events of such anguish in a comic style, Patrick suffering and considering his suffering in a syntax of studied ironic detachment, an inferno contained in an icebox. Confining Patrick within these aesthetic trappings mirrors the repressive effects of his suffocating social atmosphere, the upper-class world he is bom into. In the third volume, Some Hope, Patrick parties with Princess Margaret: these are people on franker terms with their nannies and stable boys than their blood relatives. At this altitude of English society, the emotional air is cold and thin.
Therefore so must be St Aubyn's writing, even when it witnesses monstrous acts. In the first volume, Never Mind, Patrick's father, David, fresh from raping his five-year-old son, reflects over lunch "that he had perhaps pushed his disdain for middle-class prudery a little too far. Even at the bar of the Cavalry and Guards Club one couldn't boast about homosexual, paedophiliac incest with any confidence of a favourable reception." Packed in those two sentences is all St Aubyn's callousness, and satire of callousness. Only he can pivot with such jarring speed from the Narcotics Anonymous meeting to the country-house weekend, interrupting the Proustian digressions of one guest to hear from some comic side-piece, such as the nasty, hilarious baronet Nicholas Pratt.
Only institutionally recognised towards the end of their production--the fourth volume, Mother's Milk, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006, and all five were adapted for a TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch in 2018--the Melrose books are now considered modern classics. More than that, though, they have achieved a cult status. They are reportedly deeply valued in the psychological community, featuring in textbooks on emotional health. And they have found an evangelical pool of readers, who value their masculine-confessional honesty, their familiarity with both cruelty and empathy, and the platinum finish of their prose. Certainly, within my beleaguered circle of young male fiction readers, they are among the few contemporary novels that are pressed upon the uninitiated with earnest insistence.
The same cannot be said for St Aubyn's non-Melrose work. His five other novels are clearly the work of the same writer. Their big-picture concerns (family, identity, transcendence) and more incidental ingredients (drugs, anti-Americanism, the super-rich) are shared with the Melrose series. But reading these novels is like watching a world-class chef working while drunk, skidding around the kitchen and capsizing saucepans. The quantities of his similes are misjudged; his satire is roughly hewn instead of finely chopped; plot and pacing are left to burn. All suffer from some crucial missing quantity, some failure of engagement or focus from their author, a failure which unfortunately then becomes their reader's.
Now we have Parallel Lines, St Aubyn's sixth non-Melrose offering, which despite its title resembles a spaghetti junction of competing subplots, lacking the Melrose series' command and direction. It is the sequel to 2021's Double Blind, apparently part of a planned trilogy featuring the same characters: Francis, who works in rewilding on a country estate; Olivia, his partner, who works in genetics; her friend Lucy, who has been diagnosed with brain cancer; and Lucy's employer and later partner, Hunter, a financier funding various neuroscientific ventures. The quadrilateral is supplemented by Father Guido, a Catholic priest, and Olivia's adoptive parents, the psychoanalysts Lizzie and Martin, and the latter's schizophrenic patient Sebastian.
In Double Blind, there was a sense of St Aubyn writing at a renewed voltage, and, to judge by the exhaustive references to biology, botany and psychoanalysis, at deeper levels of research. It even seemed to indicate an experimental new merger, this time between the Hampstead novel and the novel of ideas. Unfortunately, at times these ideas bordered on regurgitation: "There were 128 genes in one hundred and eight loci associated with 'enduring psychosis'," St Aubyn writes at one point, presumably peering into a spreadeagled copy of Gray's Anatomy. (Freud heavily informs Melrose too, but St Aubyn didn't feel the need to show his working.) And, though framed intriguingly around its title--the scientists have various arguments to make against genetic fundamentalism, and we soon learn that Sebastian is Olivia's long-lost twin, a classic test-case--Double Blind ultimately made for a discursive as opposed to dramatic experience.
Double Blind simply stopped instead of ending, and for the sake of resolution it is pleasing to see its story resumed in Parallel Lines. St Aubyn wisely jettisons some of his more tedious subplots (such as a research project Olivia and her father discussed on schizophrenia, which threatened the prospect of Edward St Aubyn not only reading scientific papers but also writing them). However, those that remain clog the text. Francis's rewilding projects, Hunter's existential conversations with Father Guido ("A paradox is an irony that's been turned into a meaning") and even Lucy's terminal illness become diversionary. The most engaging parts of the novel are concerned with Olivia and Sebastian, the latter of whom showcases some of St Aubyn's best writing since Melrose.
Having made improvements throughout Double Blind as a patient in therapy with Martin--who has deduced that Sebastian is his adopted daughter's twin but told neither of them--Sebastian is now institutionalised during the pandemic, when his in-person sessions were suspended. His schizophrenia, and its rapid associative brainwaves, make for rich if distressing reading. But, like Milton's Satan, the schizophrenic gets all the best lines, whether imagining the "cappuccino waves foaming on rocks below a cliffside restaurant" or considering the liminal nature of "tomorrow": "It was anticipation's midnight child, hope's shuddering little death, a theory somewhere between 24 hours and a second away from being falsified." Sebastian's polyphonous interior monologues are the novel's highlight, recalling Patrick's antic, heroin-high disposition in Bad News.
The tension of Sebastian's trajectory is his inevitable convergence with Olivia, parallel lines brought, like charged cables, into crackling contact. But while we watch them approach each other, we endure an ocean of novelistic incidents, longing for the comic similes and wrought dialogue a full-strength St Aubyn can bring off. Later in the novel, one toff declares: "'Lord Cameron, if you please, the noble life peer, or death peer, as he should be called, since his grotesque title will, thank goodness, die with him, must have begged to be made Foreign Secretary so that he could spend more days abroad than the rest of us after the catastrophe of his second unconstitutional pleb-iscite,' he said, leaping on the first syllable of the last word, like a beast on its prey."
Fun: except we had "pounced on the last word, like a beast on its prey" 17 pages earlier. If none of this quite works--and it doesn't quite--the twin outputs of Edward St Aubyn form a larger literary test- case. Where other writers shift register when dabbling in autofiction (David Copperfield is Dickens's most charming if not his greatest book), St Aubyn shifts entire planes. Even after a hiatus (there were 11 years between the third and fourth Patrick Melrose novels), St Aubyn's alter ego appears to be the only thing that lends him the narrative frame he needs to produce great fiction. One wonders if Patrick might ever return to as the scientifically literate St Aubyn would surely now put it--reproduce the results.
Parallel Lines
Edward St Aubyn
Jonathan Cape, 272pp, 20 [pounds sterling]
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Harris, Nicholas. "Edward St Aubyn's comedy of horrors: The Patrick Melrose novels and his other works are clearly by the same writer--but produce wildly different results." New Statesman, vol. 153, no. 5813, 9 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A839855609/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=df7d69fb. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
St. Aubyn, Edward PARALLEL LINES Knopf (Fiction None) $28.00 6, 3 ISBN: 9780593535349
A hurtling ride through the world's collapse.
Continuing a storyline begun inDouble Blind (2021), St. Aubyn's latest opens with a view through the window of an onrushing train--a metaphor that will appear frequently--where Sebastian, an eminently sensitive young man, feels "the gaping wounds" of the English countryside. Sebastian is being treated, without much success, for schizophrenia and is certainly not prepared for the surprise that his doctor will reveal about his past. Sebastian's twin, Olivia, is busily married and mothering, having grown up as an adoptee apart from him. Olivia has found work writing radio scripts on the unfolding sixth extinction, with "artificial intelligence, pandemics, nuclear annihilation, global warming, asteroids and overpopulation" among her unhappy subjects. Olivia's tale entwines with that of the mogul Hunter Sterling, now the partner of Lucy, the center of the previous novel, both of them having retreated from the world after Hunter's sale of a startup to "a Silicon Valley amortality company, which exploited the fear of death by offering to download its customers' consciousness onto a 'non-biological substrate.'" St. Aubyn's piece makes a neat companion to David Mitchell'sCloud Atlas in depicting harried people constantly on the run, on the make, and at the end of their tethers in a time of crumbling civilizations--in which, pointedly, the "current batch of the super-rich" who want to "piss off to Mars or swap Europe for Europa" are savaged as a class and a few world leaders ("I due amici, Putin and Trump") are lampooned by name, all with great good slashingly sarcastic humor. St. Aubyn's closing, which leaves room for another episode, is quite sincere, though, and even affecting in recounting Sebastian and Olivia's tentative efforts to form not just a relationship but a family, the only bastion against doom.
An elegantly arch but empathetic excursion into impending apocalypse, and some of St. Aubyn's best work yet.
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"St. Aubyn, Edward: PARALLEL LINES." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A839213395/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ac7dec13. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.
PARALLEL LINES, by Edward St. Aubyn
''My funny Guillotine ... sweet, comic Guillotine,'' he sings. Also: ''Pill-cutter, pill-cutter, cut me a pill.'' And: ''Senator Krupke, I'm down on my knees, because nobody wants a fellow with a mental disease.''
This is Sebastian, the ebullient schizophrenic at the center of ''Parallel Lines,'' the new, uneven Edward St. Aubyn novel. Sebastian is a preposterously winning fictional creation. He owes a debt to Randle McMurphy in Ken Kesey's ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,'' to Lionel Essrog, the private detective with Tourette's Syndrome in Jonathan Lethem's ''Motherless Brooklyn'' and to some of the motormouth talkers in Philip Roth's fiction.
Sometimes the radio station in Sebastian's head is tuned to the dark, self-loathing feed that the writer Tommy Tomlinson has called USUCK-FM. But more often, the songs emerge as delirious patter. He hopes to get out of the mental hospital where he's been placed after a dramatic episode and become ''an ambulatory schizophrenic, whistling 'Carmen,' as he ambulated down the boulevards, a cane in one hand and a tuft of hair in the other. 'Torre adore! la di-da di-da.'''
Sebastian was formed, in large part, on the anvil of childhood trauma. This is a quality that links him with Patrick Melrose, the protagonist of St. Aubyn's best-known work -- the five interconnected novels sometimes referred to as the Melrosiad, or, as the author prefers, the Melroses. Most of the resemblances between Seb and Patrick stop there.
St. Aubyn crashed out of the gate with those wicked Melrose novels, in the same manner Karl Ove Knausgaard did with his ''My Struggle'' series. Both writers have experienced what seems to be an identity crisis since those defining peaks. Each is a vastly talented novelist working out what kind of writer he now wants to be.
For St. Aubyn, one answer was provided in his last novel, ''Double Blind'' (2021). Among its subjects, I wrote at the time, were brain-mapping, biochemistry, immunotherapy, schizophrenia and the ethics of placebos. ''Parallel Lines'' is a sequel (oh no) to that novel. You don't have to have read ''Double Blind'' to swallow this one. The same large cast is here, caught up with a few years later, just after the worst of Covid. The setting, most of the time, is London.
There are shrinks, people making radio programs about the varieties of approaching Armageddon, portentous land and light artists, a woman fighting cancer, a boy named Noah with an ark, estranged twins, a billionaire who is almost palatable despite what is called his ''belligerent hospitality,'' a priest or two, and an awful mother named (what else?) Karen.
The topics on the table this time -- indeed, this novel reads like bright table talk -- include the nature of psychoanalysis (''a form of literary criticism in which the text is the subconscious''), patronage, compassion burnout, dietary virtue, developments in oncology, faith, coffee, dinosaurs, conceptual art and Donald Trump as sociopath and narcissist.
The primary theme, however, is connection -- synchronicity, surges of coincidence, twinning, mirroring, whatever you want to label it, all coming together ''like a bride having her hair braided before a wedding.'' St. Aubyn finds links and associations everywhere; every corner of the known universe heaves with layers of meaning.
St. Aubyn is worth reading, nearly all the time, because his novels contain brutal and funny intellectual content. He's a briny writer, one who dispatches a stream of salty commentary, sentences that whoosh past like arrows:
Making people proud of what they used to be ashamed of is such an intoxicating alchemy.
She had a face like a court summons you'd scrunched up angrily and then fished out of the bin and tried to flatten.
An unexamined life always commands the highest price for an autobiography.
You can probably pick up an air defense system at Walmart in El Paso.
Thomas dispatched the two Negronis with the relief of a man chucking a couple of overdue thank-you letters through the slit of a postbox.
Wondering, as she always did, why olive oil was alone in having extra virginity.
His men and women, most of them comfortably off, worry if the barbarism of the age can be redeemed while worrying about their own small, boutique barbarisms. They are trying to save what's savable, inside and out, from a world on fire.
St. Aubyn's talents are mighty, so much so that you wonder why this novel, and its predecessor, aren't even better than they are. ''Parallel Lines'' is a high-level entertainment, but it's so incident- and idea-packed that nothing quite sticks. St. Aubyn can be as philosophically acute as Iris Murdoch but, unlike her fiction, you're rarely aware of the hull below the brightly painted watertight deck. ''Parallel Lines'' lacks a certain earthiness; you never sense the blood flowing under its characters' hair.
What about Sebastian? He's the primary reason to be here. He rips into the Jam song ''That's Entertainment!'' at the least appropriate moments. He wishes that, like a cow, he could stomach anything. He calls his shrink of five years his ''psycho-nanny-lyst.'' Placed in the hospital's Suicide Observation Room, he comments that ''with a name like that, you would have thought it would be stuffed with pistols and daggers and grenades and cyanide capsules.'' Even though he is fully grown, the reader half wants to adopt him.
Like a Shakespearean comedy, ''Parallel Lines'' builds up to a big coming-together, this time in an art gallery, with most of the major characters crammed into a small space. In the penultimate sentence, someone says, ''To be continued.'' Are these novels destined to become part of a trilogy? I'd probably read a third one, but I get paid for this.
PARALLEL LINES | By Edward St. Aubyn | Knopf | 264 pp. | $28
Dwight Garner has been a book critic for The Times since 2008, and before that was an editor at the Book Review for a decade.
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Garner, Dwight. "Synchronicity." The New York Times Book Review, 15 June 2025, p. 15. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A843996895/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=aa9b2a47. Accessed 29 Nov. 2025.