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 born 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
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[See also: Faith is a half-formed thing]
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This article appears in the 07 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Peace Delusion