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Edward St. Aubyn’s sharp trilogy
BY RICHARD C. WALLS
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Some Hope: A Trilogy
By Edward St. Aubyn. Open City Books, 344 pages, $14.95.
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These three novellas, each running just over 100 pages, were first published separately in England in the early ’90s; now they’ve been collected and published in the US. Never Mind, Bad News, and Some Hope follow their protagonist, Patrick Melrose, from an abusive childhood through a major drug problem and finally some sort of recovery. Age five during the first story, he’s sexually molested by his father; age 22 during the second, he spends a drug-addled 48 hours in Manhattan, where he’s come to collect his father’s ashes; age 30 in the final one, he’s a fragile survivor, looking for some reason to continue in the midst of his muted rage and blanketing despair. It is, at times, a very funny book. Patrick is a scion of the British upper classes, and St. Aubyn depicts that breed’s excessive uselessness with an unforgiving familiarity (the book is partly autobiographical, though one would hesitate to assert which parts). There’s something of Evelyn Waugh in his approach, minus the underlying fondness for the posh, and with a dollop of post-Amis sophisticated smart-assery. His mouthpiece in the first book — or thoughtpiece, since she keeps her disapproving opinions to herself — is an American named Anne Eisen who marvels, with Yankee practicality, at how these people can be admired (at least by their peers) for simply doing nothing for a long period of time. Speaking of one character in particular, she nails the general absurdity of the idle classes: "He was just one of those Englishmen who was always saying silly things to sound less pompous, and pompous things to sound less silly. They turned into self-parodies without going to the trouble of acquiring a self first." Patrick’s mother, Eleanor, is one of those etiolated spirits carried through her days by vast quantities of booze; his monstrous father, David, is a sociopathic tormenter who believes that "what redeemed life from complete horror was the almost unlimited number of things to be nasty about." After first molesting his son, he thinks: "If he had committed any crime, it was to set about his son’s education too assiduously. He was conscious of already being sixty, there was so much to teach him and so little time." David may seem a rather too dark heavy to set in what seems like a comedy of ill-manners, but St. Aubyn manages to make him, if not forgivable, then almost tragic. Having abandoned careers in music and medicine, he has a sensitive artist still lurking somewhere in his stunted being: "At the piano he could sometimes abandon the ironic tactics which saturated his speech, and visitors whom he had bullied and teased to the point of exasperation found themselves moved by the piercing sadness of the music in the library." By the time of Bad News, Patrick has, no surprise, developed a punishing drug habit, alternately taking intravenous hits of cocaine and heroin and popping ancillary pills — speed, Quaaludes — to fine-tune the confusion. He favors near-death experiences brought about by near-lethal injections of coke, seeking "that heartbreaking moment, as compressed as the autobiography of a drowning man, but as elusive and intimate as the smell of a flower." He can’t give up drugs, Patrick tells himself, because they "filled him with such intense emotion. The sense of power they gave him was, admittedly, rather subjective (ruling the world from under the bedcovers, until the milkman arrived and you thought he was a platoon of stormtroopers come to steal your drugs and splatter your brains across the wall), but then again, life was so subjective." After duly picking up his father’s remains, Patrick binges and St. Aubyn gives us a tour-de-force version of his chemical ride. The mood is relatively calmer in Some Hope, though its centerpiece, a ghastly party with visiting royalty in the personage of Princess Margaret, has the author again showing his corrosive bite. If Patrick continues to suffer, as Anne puts it, from "the craving for the prophylactic of irony," he’s also "desperate to escape the self-subversion of irony and say what he really meant, but really meaning what only irony could convey." St. Aubyn is a skillful, insightful, and witty writer who has chosen to tell an unhappy story through the view of characters who tend to operate in an ironic mode. Still, and despite that mercifully distancing approach, it is, at times, a very sad book.
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