~ At Last, by Edward St Aubyn ~
This is the last book in Melrose series, based on the dysfunctional, charming, devastated and devastating Patrick Melrose. The cover blurb calls it a “masterpiece of glittering dark comedy and profound emotional truth”, which is pretty apt a summation.
All the Melrose books are characterised by their wit and eloquence, and the razor-sharp class commentary; At Last is no different. It starts with the death of Eleanor, Patrick’s mother, and her funeral at which of course old friends, family, and not-quite-friends are gathered.
‘ I think my mother’s death is the best thing to happen to me since…well, since my father’s death,’ said Patrick.
p166
The funeral is fairly decorous, but the social gathering afterwards rips the lid off polite conventions and social deceptions, unmercifully revealing the depths of many different psychoses and egomanias from the people around Patrick.
There is some marvellous psychoanalysis of Eleanor’s hopeless parenting, exceptionally bad choices in life, and rather ridiculous beliefs:
The sources of compulsion [Eleanor’s philanthropy] were complex. There was the repetitive syndrome of a disinherited daughter; there was a rejection of the materialism and snobbery of her mother’s world; and there was the basic shame at having any money at all, an unconscious drive to make her net worth and self-worth converge in a perfect zero.
p100
The rapier wit leaves no places to hide:
she [Virginia Jonson, Eleanor’s aunt and inspiration] made so much difference to so many lives, showing that ardent selflessness which is often more stubborn than open egotism
p100
St Aubyn is relentless when it comes to stripping away hypocrisies and conflating self-delusions:
She [Eleanor] was trying to save Mary [Patrick’s wife] from Patrick, not out of any insight into her circumstances, but in order to save herself, by some retroactive magic, from David [Patrick’s father, Eleanor’s husband]
p77
The author has a marvellous turn of phrase that manages to communicate vividly, while poking fun at those taking themselves seriously. Writing of Mary’s anger:
Mary decided to keep a cold silence. They were already in Hammersmith and she was easily furious enough to last until Chelsea.
p187
Depicting the wife Mary’s adulterous lover, St Aubyn paints her in scathing tones:
Emily complained about Cambridge, she complained about her husband and about her sons, she complained about her house, she complained about France and the sun and the clouds and the leaves and the wind and the bottle tops. She couldn’t stop; she had to bail out the flooding dinghy of her discontent.
p67
St Aubyn’s cadences are so beautiful, his use of punctuation so delightful, and his observation and analogy so astute and apt that sometimes it is hard to remember just how bleak his characterisations are, of practically the entire cast in this novel.
The best of his analysis is of course on the character of Patrick, our protagonist for 5 books. Having at last shaken off his alcoholism and drug abuse, he is on the road to recovery; Patrick used to greet every day in his early twenties with the basic question,
Can anyone think of a good reason not to kill himself.
p50
Now, however, older, wiser, more insightful, he understands his suicidal inclinations differently:
he had only ever been superficially in love with easeful death and was much more deeply enthralled with his own personality, Suicide wore the mask of self-rejection; but in reality nobody took their personality more seriously than the person who was planning to kill himself on its instructions. Nobody was more determined to stay in charge at any cost, to force the most mysterious aspect of life into their own imperious schedule.
p51
Patrick is increasingly able to see through himself and recognise his own obfucations,
He watched a modest veil of self-disgust settle on the subject of his relations with women, trying to prevent him from going deeper. Self-disgust was the easy way out, he must cut through it and allow himself to be unconsoled.
p222
He even begins to understand better this dysfunctional relationship with his mother – at first, Patrick wonders why he mourns a woman he was never close to, then realises,
It is not the end of closeness but the end of the longing for closeness that he had to mourn.
p111
The beautiful nuance in St Aubyn’s work, in such throwaway sentences – in this case observing not the thing lost but the hope of having that thing, now irrevocably lost – is part of the charm of all the Melrose series – the cutting through of pretences and confusions, with clarity of thought and succinctness of language.
Patrick had a fervent desire to be left alone matched only by his fervent desire not to be left alone.
p120
St Aubyn even manages to make Patrick’s monster of a father, David, well worth writing about; I admit I practically shouted with laughter, reading this passage:
In many ways, David had been an obscure failure, but his presence had possessed a rare and precious quality: pure contempt. He bestrode middle-class morality like a colossus. Other people laboured through the odd bigoted remark, but David had embodied an absolute disdain for the opinion of the world.
p128
The novel has no plotline as it were, it is merely the conversations and mental musings of this section of high society gathered at Eleanor’s funeral, but the novel needs no plotline: its observations and comments and social satire make it immensely readable and engaging, from first to last. A lovely example of a novel where form perhaps takes precedence over content, style over storyline.
Recent Comments