Edward St. Aubyn, “The Patrick Melrose Novels”

All of the current enthusiasm for Edward St. Aubyn’s latest novel At Last made me curious about the earlier Patrick Melrose books — curious but nervous. On the one hand, they were supposed to be dazzling dissections of emotional disarray in the English upper class. But on the other hand, they featured harrowing episodes like five-year-old Patrick’s rape by his father, or a luridly drug-fueled weekend in New York some years later. Stylish, disturbing, mordantly funny; eventually I had to try them. So I picked up the elegant omnibus edition that contains Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk. That was three days ago, and I’ve hardly been separated from the volume since. Some readers have compared St. Aubyn’s work to Evelyn Waugh’s books and superficially, that makes sense. St. Aubyn writes of Waugh’s aristocratic world, but with a kind of despairing rigor, exposing the emotional emptiness and dishonesty that used to pass for upper-class style. He’s angry; he’s funny; he steers clear of self-pity and his authority over the material is complete.

We begin, in Never Mind, at the beautiful Melrose house in the south of France, watching the magnetic and dashing David Melrose torturing ants with a hose on the terrace. Oh, great — an idle sadist. We meet his drunken and wealthy wife Eleanor, her purse clanking with liquor bottles. And little Patrick, whose wariness betrays the damage that’s already been done. It’s only 132 pages, but I couldn’t have taken any more. St. Aubyn drifts adeptly from one point of view to another, managing to elicit both sympathy and horror. Patrick’s parents are monsters, but you can sort of see why. (From Some Hope: “Perhaps he would have to settle for the idea that it must have been even worse being his father than being someone his father had attempted to destroy.”)

Bad News was the hardest of the four to get through; David Melrose is now dead and Patrick, a 22-year-old heroin addict with too much money, has to go to New York to pick up his father’s ashes. We’re in Patrick’s sorry consciousness for every moment of a vile weekend. Yet somehow St. Aubyn has built enough sympathy for his character that you feel you need to stay with Patrick. He shows his hand at one point: “… he again wondered what kept him from suicide. Was it something as contemptible as sentimentality, or hope, or narcissism? No. It was really the desire to know what would happen next, despite the conviction that it was bound to be horrible: the narrative suspense of it all.” (What happens next:  his heroin dealer telephones.)

The Great Barrier Reef: "vulgar."

Some Hope is an interlude of sorts: Patrick is now thirty, and the narrative circles around a big country-house party. The social comedy is broader (if no less dark), and Patrick has managed to kick the drugs and attract a genuine friend, Johnny Hall, to whom he actually reveals the story of his father’s abuse. By Mother’s Milk, he’s taken the daring step of marrying and having children. It’s not going particularly well:

He had made it out of Zone One, where a parent was doomed to make his child experience what he had hated most about his life, but he was still stuck in Zone Two, where the painstaking avoidance of Zone One blinded him to fresh mistakes. In Zone Two giving was based on what the giver lacked. Nothing was more exhausting than this deficiency-driven, overcompensating zeal. He dreamed of Zone Three. He sensed that it was there, just over the hill, like the rumor of a fertile valley.”

His mother has given away the French house to a “Transpersonal Foundation,” has had a pair of strokes, and wants him to help her commit suicide. He loves his children, cheats on his wife, drinks way too much. He sees, already, the damage he’s doing to his older son. He tries to do better.

And sown throughout these books are throwaway bits of brilliance like a horrid woman at the party in Some Hope, talking about incest carelessly, confessing that she never sees her son in Australia:

Fergus took me to the coast and forced me to go snorkeling. All I can say is that the Great Barrier Reef is the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen. It’s one’s worst nightmare, full of frightful loud colors, peacock blues, and impossible oranges all higgledy-piggledy while one’s mask floods.’”

Metaphor? Reality? Funny? Tragic? Brilliant, really.

Tom Rachman, “The Imperfectionists”

The Imperfectionists begins with a seventy-year-old man in Paris listening to his wife come home after spending the night with the man across the hall. And that’s just paragraph two of the first page. This is the first of many, many tragicomic humiliations Tom Rachman deals out in 269 pages. And I’m afraid they are going to be itching away under my skin for a while now.

Would I be so perturbed if I weren’t a writer myself? Would it bother me so much to see the newspaper business being skewered? Would it bother me if Rachman weren’t so young? If he didn’t show some affection for the dinosaur of the daily paper? If he weren’t such a darn good writer? If my father hadn’t been a newspaper reporter? Don’t read this one, Dad. You’ll only find it upsetting.

The structure is very clever. The characters all work at or for an unnamed English-language newspaper published from Rome. It was founded in the 1950s by an American industrialist and kept alive as part of the family corporation for more than fifty years. Each chapter, titled like a newspaper article, is virtually a short story, focusing on one character. We start with the Paris stringer, a hopeless old hack, and move on to the obituary writer, a business reporter, etc. etc. Their stories become intertwined and you begin to understand the personalities and relationships of the newsroom much as you would by working there. Rachman is very acute, homing in on his characters’ vulnerabilities, self-deceptions, strengths and weaknesses. He is not, thank goodness, mean.

So did I like it? I’m the wrong person to ask. In a way The Imperfectionists is like one of those English satires — Lucky Jim, perhaps, or A Fairly Honourable Defeat — that treats its inhabitants awfully harshly for my taste. Granted, Rachman is more humane than either Kingsley Amis or Irish Murdoch, but we are laughing at rather than with people here. (It’s much kinder, though, than Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, which would be the obvious comparison.) And while I can see the humor, I have a lot of trouble laughing at people I feel sorry for. Case in point: the Roman matron who is reading the newspaper, cover to cover, day by day. Her English is so bad that she is close to twenty years behind. Funny, right? She goes batty when the carefully hoarded issue of April 23, 1994 does not appear with the rest of the filed copies. When you find out why, you’re kind of stunned. (Little tour de force, BTW, as Rachman has her flick through decades’ worth of headlines.)

Oh, it’s good, no question about that. Perhaps I’m just overly sensitive. “The paper — that daily report on the idiocy and the brilliance of the species — had never before missed an appointment. Now it was gone.” Sorry, it’s hard for me to call that comedy.

Lloyd Jones, “Mister Pip”

Very early in this book comes a piece of wisdom from Mr. Watts (also known as Pop Eye, and as “Mister Pip”): “I have no wisdom, none at all.  The truest thing I can tell you is that whatever we have between us is all we’ve got. Oh, and of course Mr. Dickens.”

For most of Jones’ readers, Dickens is going to be the familiar character here, but for the children in an unnamed village on the island of Bougainville, he is a stranger. And Mr. Watts, the only white man in the village, has come to be their teacher amid chaotic circumstances. Apparently all he can think of to do, in order to keep order and impart wisdom or even information to the village children, is to read Great Expectations aloud. The narrator, Pip, becomes lodged in the imagination of Matilda, who narrates Mister Pip.

You could say this book was an inversion of Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, in which the hapless English aristocrat ends up in the South American jungle, perpetually reading Dickens aloud to his de factor captor. You could equally say that, like Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, this is a story about the power of a story. I always like those.

A lot happens. The South Pacific island of Bougainville is torn apart by two factions known to the villagers as the “redskins” and the “rambos.” The island is being blockaded, so there is no food, and no real way for the villagers to escape. (There’s a certain Lord of the Flies feeling to it, as well.) Matilda’s mother frames Mr. Watts’ reading of Dickens as blasphemous, and goes toe to toe with him for control of the children’s souls. She cannot understand how Mr. Watts can believe in Pip but not believe in the devil.  In fact, his choice is curious, because evil is certainly abroad on this island.

Jones structures the novel ingeniously, constantly cranking up the tension and raising the stakes. He writes really well: the voice of the narrator, Matilda, is immensely appealing. And he’s not afraid of the big emotional statement. But what probably moved me most was the paragraph when Matilda explains why she is so loyal to Dickens: Great Expectations “supplied me with another world at a time when it was desperately needed. It gave me a friend in Pip. It taught me you can slip under the skin of another just as easily as your own… Now, if that isn’t an act of magic, I don’t know what is.”

Jane Mulvagh, “Madresfield: The Real Brideshead”

This one’s a little frustrating. Madresfield is a little-known English country house that served as the inspiration for Brideshead Revisited.  But part of what made it interesting to Mulvagh was its early history and the fact that the house has been lived in by the same family for hundreds of years. I suspect the book is actually a PhD. dissertation with pretty illustrations; there’s a lot of enthusiasm about the range of documents I could not quite share.

Lots of description of the countryside, lots of narrative about Elgar’s relationship with the family but the really juicy stuff doesn’t happen until page 277 when it transpires that the 7th Earl, father of seven, a devout churchman, was also bisexual and indiscreet.  Big scandal, exile to Europe, etc. Lots of collateral damage done to the children; Evelyn Waugh was a friend of one of the daughters. Hence the source of his inspiration.

Mulvagh clearly feels strongly about the house and grateful to the current chatelaine; one senses her discretion about the scandal and the emotional fallout.  She does make the point that the Lygon children, like Waught’s Flytes, were cast out of Eden as a result of their father’s misbehavior.  The girls couldn’t marry “well,” and the boys were troubled. Perhaps most interesting is the point made by David Cannadine in the Foreword, that the true inspiration for Brideshead was not “a Vanbrugh stage set, a palazzo fortissimo” but a moated manor house, hidden away in a foggy vale. I doubt, though, that this book is going to erase Castle Howard from my mind.