This book revisits Patrick Melrose, the five year old boy whose horrific abuse was central to Never Mind, and who is now in his early twenties. Hardly surprisingly, Patrick has not grown up to become a happy, well-adjusted adult. Instead he is a full-blown drug addict, injecting heroin and cocaine, balancing highs with lows so that he can, to some small extent, continue to interact with the world. The novel opens on Patrick sitting on a plane - the Concord, no less - on his way to pick up the remains of his dead father in New York. The pressure of that gruesome task and the impact of his abusive father's death on Patrick's psyche send him into a downward spiral in the form of a massive bender that lasts until he is back on the Concord, on his way back to England in possession of a box full of ashes.
Like the first book of the series, this one takes place over the space of a short time, about 48 hours in Patrick's intense life. Unlike Never Mind, though, this is told entirely from Patrick's viewpoint, save for a very short episode towards the end of the book which is told from the perspective of a girl who unwisely agrees to have dinner with Patrick in his significantly altered state. I'm not sure why St Aubyn felt it necessary here to depart from the third person limited narrator he otherwise uses consistently throughout the book. Whilst it is interesting to get a glimpse of how other people view Patrick during this period, I don't think the departure was necessary - it is blatantly clear, from our knowledge of what Patrick is doing, thinking, absorbing, that his altered state would render him less than impressive to people whose lives are not on the same track as his.
Patrick, in this book, is not a likeable character. But he is well aware of that fact, and makes up for it somewhat by despising himself more than any other person possibly could. He is self-absorbed and unable to cope with anyone else's emotional needs, including those of his girlfriend, Debbie, who he has left behind in England. We learn that he is having an affair with another girl, and thinks nothing of also trying to have a fling during his short visit to New York. This is a broken person, someone who is so consumed by their own breakdown that they have nothing left over to give the rest of the world. This state of being, combined with his aristocratic upbringing, causes Patrick to express himself exclusively in the cynical, nasty way that appears to be peculiar to a particular class of English people: "What was the point of a book if you couldn't carry it around with you as a theoretical defence against boredom?" There is no joy in Patrick's self-expression, which is fitting as there is a clear absence of joy in his life.
As well as the colourful cast of underworld characters he encounters on his constant search for more and better drugs, Patrick meets up again with some of the friends his parents had over for dinner in the first book of this series, Never Mind. One of the interesting things about the Patrick Melrose novels is the way the world of the British aristocracy is portrayed as being quite small - Patrick encounters and interacts with his parents' friends, in the absence of his parents, more than most of us these days would with members of another generation. The feeling this evokes is the inevitability of that world, the knowledge that there is no escaping it; by virtue of his birth, Patrick will always belong to this society, no matter how far he runs or how low he sinks.
Really, though, Bad News is mainly a terribly confronting novel about an addict's full descent into life-threatening drug abuse. There were times when I had to look away from the book, gathering myself before reading on, because the descriptions of dirty syringes and injecting into disappearing veins were so potent and so disturbing. There was a passage in which Patrick's altered mind took on multiple personalities, taunting him with endlessly fractured conversations, and reading this was like experiencing Patrick's disturbing high along with him. There were times when Patrick toyed with the idea of suicide, and his blase attitude towards it impressed upon me just how depressed he is, underneath all of the drugs: "As the telephone rang he 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." At several points during the book Patrick almost dies from the rush he so relentlessly pursues, a fact that he accepts without surprise, shock or fear. I found it terribly sad that the momentary but extreme high upon injecting is the one second of happiness Patrick can find in his life, and even he knows that it is not a real happiness, and that it comes at an enormous cost.
Some reviewers have said how much they disliked Patrick in this book. But all I felt for him was immense pity. Here is a person struggling against a past that will not let him go; struggling with the certainty that nothing good could possibly lie ahead for him. I looked up at one stage in my reading and said to Bibliohubby how relieved I was that I am not a drug addict! It must be just awful, that merciless and exhausting need, from which there is no escaping. St Aubyn's writing of this world is just extraordinary; I don't know how he could have done this, distilling the essence of addiction and depression and grief into a 48 hour period in his protagonist's life, unless he had been there himself.
Overall assessment: 4.5 out of 5. I was blown away, again, by St Aubyn's electric writing, by the vividness of the characterisation, by the total immersion I felt in the prose and the story.
Pros / favourite passages: Even amidst the horror of Patrick's life St Aubyn manages to inject some of his characteristic caustic humour. When Patrick first makes his way to the funeral home where he is to pick up his father's ashes he is initially falsely directed to the wrong room, where a Jewish crowd is in mourning. St Aubyn writes: "Death was no doubt an overwhelming experience, but it must be even more powerful than he had imagined if it could transform his father into a small Jew with so many amusing new friends."
So much of this book is dedicated to the intricacies of drug addiction and the detailed mechanics of taking drugs, but St Aubyn still manages to illustrate the social milieu in which Patrick mixes, and the relationship between Patrick and his father since we last met him at five years old, using both to explore the themes of personal identity - how it is created, what creates it - and childhood, the failed raising of children amongst the British upper classes. When he meets a friend from England and stops to chat with her parents, they talk of Patrick's father, as one does about someone who has just died:
"But wouldn't we now say that he was just wery disturbed?" asked Eddy.
"So what if we did? When the effect somebody has is destructive enough the cause becomes a theoretical curiosity. There are some very nasty people in the world and it is a a pity if one of them is your father."
"I don't think that people noo so much about how to bring up kids in those days. A lot of parents in your fawther's generation just didn't know how to express their love."
"Cruelty is the opposite of love," said Patrick, "not just some inarticulate version of it."
Cons: As with Never Mind, there are very few cons to mention here, except for the darkness of the topic, and the fact that the vivid imagery was difficult to stomach at times.
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