Like the first four novels in the Patrick Melrose series, the time and place of the action is narrowly restricted, and there is only one event—in this case, the funeral of Patrick’s mother Eleanor.
It takes place exactly on April 9, 2005, conflicting, as Patrick’s impossible Aunt Nancy vehemently complains, with the wedding of Charles and Camilla.
We’ve covered a lot of time with Patrick. We first met—in Never Mind—in 1965 when Patrick was five. Bad News presented one weekend of Patrick’s drug-addled twenties, Some Hope presented one weekend of Patrick’s semi-cleaned up thirties. Mother’s Milk brought Patrick up to the 21st century, viewed through the eyes of his two sons.
St. Aubyn is focused, not expansive. He writes about a small number of events, concerning a handful of people, from an extremely limited milieu. Aesthetic fastidiousness coincides with a clear-sighted awareness of limitations.
On the other hand, there is a clear ambition to document the change of eras during a life.
Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time is the most obvious precedent. Beyond the obvious similiarities, St. Aubyn has Powell’s virtue of a style that is hard, dry and uninterested in fantasy—crisply empirical.
However unlike Powell, St. Aubyn is never boring. Where Powell is rigorously mundane, St. Aubyn is always describing something so grotesque, or quoting somebody’s grotesque remarks. Above all, everyone in St. Aubyn seethes with hunger. Though Patrick Melrose might be less probable that Nick Jenkins, he’s definitely more entertaining.
Waugh is probably St. Aubyn's patron. I can imagine prayers and tears directed toward his shrine. However Waugh fatally ended up identifying with and believing in his poshies.
Proust is not so far-fetched a comparison. Proust is one of the few authors who come up in the Melrose novels. St. Aubyn’s literary references are very few, but they are always choice. At the end of Chapter 3 in Never Mind, Victor jokingly recalls to Anne Proust’s scene where a lunch of lamb with sauce Béarnaise left “the poor Duc de Guermantes so famished that he had no time to chat with the dying Swann’s dubious daughter before hurrying off to dinner.”
That scene—which the philosopher Victor doesn’t remember quite accurately—is recalled for the sake of the pretext, instead of its content. It’s an apex of Proust’s art—a perfect fusion of comedy and pathos. St. Aubyn doesn’t fuse the two so elegantly, but it’s the resonance he aspires to.
However unlike Proust or Waugh—or Alan Hollinghurst—St. Aubyn can never be accused of being infatuated by his wealthy and aristocratic characters. They are all monsters, spreading evil even when they intend good (e.g. Eleanor, “so entranced by her own vulnerability, so desperate to be saved.”).
Nicholas Pratt is Exhibit A. His death at the end of At Last is really a conclusion, since the series began with him. He is emblematic and allegorical, illustrating and exemplifying a whole culture that has no longer has any excuse for existing--if it ever did.
However St. Aubyn provides no hope that Nicholas—or the less toxic Aunt Nancy—is the end of the line. Patrick’s unspeakable ex Julia represents the continuity of the younger generation, quite happy to carry on the hypocrisy, false values and parasitism into another century: “Thank goodness there were people who were happy with nothing, thought Julia, so that people like her (and everyone else she had ever met), could have more.”
Not that anybody else comes off any better. A source of suspense throughout the series is awaiting the arrival of a “positive” character. Spoiler alert: this never happens.
Anne, the one relatively sane and sympathetic character who memorably takes pity on little Patrick in the first novel, is carefully identified as being completely ineffectual. For all her sympathy, she accomplishes nothing. Mary, the mother of Patrick's two sons, is presented as an admirable mom, but completely cut off from everyone and everything outside of her kids (though Patrick's view is distorted by his own extreme neediness).
Nobody accomplishes anything, but then nobody really does anything. Other than servants and service providers, there are no descriptions of anyone working. Some of the main characters do, in fact, have jobs—but their working life is kept off-stage. Whatever they do, they inevitably make a muck of (Patrick forgetting his father’s ashes in the hotel).
The one extended glimpse of people with careers is Jim and Jilly Packer in the first part of Mother’s Milk. They are not only vulgar brutes, but demonstrate to Patrick and his astonished wife and kids new varieties of selfishness and greed.
Hence it’s no surprise that the events that would comprise the meat of more conventional novels always happens off-stage.
There are some terrific dramatic confrontations: Patrick standing up to his father; his mother leaving his father; Patrick getting hooked on heroin, and quitting; Patrick becoming an attorney, marrying Mary and fathering two boys; Mary and the boys leaving Patrick. However all these thrilling scenes occur in-between the volumes.
It’s a sign of St. Aubyn’s fastidiousness and malice that he doesn’t dramatize any of Patrick’s school days. The boarding school/high school/university episodes that in Anglo-American literature serve as all-purpose, foolproof dramatic distillation of a character’s psychological, sociological, political, metaphysical world are merely alluded to in a handful of grim asides. He leaves all that to Sue Townsend--whose Andrian Mole, come to think of it, is probably as much an influence as De Sade and William Burroughs.
Patrick doesn’t need boarding school to learn that his world richly rewards selfishness, sadism and stupidity, and punishes without mercy any hint of sympathy, kindness or insight.
When events aren’t kept entirely off-stage, they are presented retrospectively, long after they have taken place. The two great events of the series, the deaths of Patrick’s father and mother, are both presented this way. As a general rule, the drama takes place in Patrick’s memory, while the comedy takes place in Patrick’s present.
The one notable exception being Patrick’s brutalization by his father in Never Mind, the crime which starts Patrick down the path of disillusion and dissolution. From that point on, the series becomes the story of the Melrose family legacy, which St. Aubyn clearly but without hocus-pocus identifies as a family curse. Patrick’s recurring lament throughout the series is the loss of his mother’s house in Saint-Nazaire. Even though it has the grimmest of associations, Patrick clings to it as the one good legacy he has been cheated of.
Instead of handing down anything nice, like a grimly contemporary House of Atreus, the House of Melrose family perqs of wealth, freedom, and aristocratic connections produce nothing but their opposites: insatiable greed and envy, pissed away lives, and estrangement from humanity.
And so the great question of the Melrose novels is Can Patrick escape the curse? The question is amplified in Mother’s Milk, where St. Aubyn—cleverly aware that some readers might have already given up on Patrick—restates the question as Can Patrick restrain from passing on the family curse to his innocent boys?
The saga consists in the working-out of this dilemma. What do you do when every memory of happiness is inextricably entangled with memories of horror? What do you do when your parents frankly and ostentatiously failed in their duty to protect and love? What next? How to proceed?
At Last ends with a distinct Maybe. Patrick decides that what he wants, after all, is to be with his sons. It doesn’t offer any guarantee that they will receive him warmly, or that things will work out. However, there is a note of longing that suggests that, after years of “reacting,” he is finally capable of “responding.”
[Illustration: De Chirico, The Double Dream of Spring, 1915]
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