Edward St Aubyn - Some Hope

I hope this isn't too boring for all of you. Once I find an author I like, I can be like a dog with a bone - I like to read through a number of their books immediately,  until I am familiar enough with their work to know if I will want to buy the next-released book as a matter of course, or whether the book I read first was a stand-out anomaly. So I emerged from Edward St Aubyn's explosive Bad News and turned immediately and greedily to his next Patrick Melrose book, Some Hope. I do promise that I will pick up a different writer next, to prevent this blog from becoming exclusively St Aubyn-themed!
This novel opens on Patrick Melrose in his 30th year. I now feel that it would be accurate to describe at least the first three parts of this five part series as the story of Patrick and his relationship with his father. Although his father is dead by the time the second novel begins, the personhood of Patrick throughout his life is obviously shaped by his feelings about his father. In this third instalment, we see Patrick clean, after successfully battling his addictions through numerous stints in rehab, still miserable, trying to find a way somehow to make peace with his dead father so that he can move on and, perhaps, find a way after all to live a useful life.

The backdrop to all of this internal strife is the gathering of various guests for a grand party at a country estate, in honour of Princess Margaret. St Aubyn here returns to the omniscient third narrator he used in Never Mind, and again uses it with wild abandon - the first half of the book leaps around to so many different characters that I found it quite difficult to remember who was who, and started wishing I had kept notes to remind myself. I actually think this would have helped my reading. As it was, I read this far more slowly than I did the first two books, with less absorption. But in the end it didn't matter - eventually the plot coalesced and the description of the party itself is a riotous read, rife with the colourful depictions of grotesque English upper-class arrogance that were so successful in the first book of this series. Really the success of these books is the ability St Aubyn has of defining and commenting so astutely on an entire class and country of people whilst keeping readers meanwhile occupied with the intriguing but smaller story of just one member of this class. As it stands, the Patrick Melrose series is a scathing indictment of the British upper class and what it represents, and how archaic, ineffectual and irrelevant it now is. In this book, St Aubyn flirts with controversy by including royalty in his critique. Princess Margaret is painted as a fatuous, mean-spirited megalomaniac - not very different from many of the other attendees at the party - and I felt as I read the account of her that St Aubyn had probably got it spot-on.

At times while I was reading this I thought nothing much was happening - but then I finished it and realised that actually tons had happened. Patrick determines that perhaps one way of dealing with his past is to be truthful about it, to talk about it, and he takes the giant step of confessing to his great friend Johnny Hall what happened to him as a child. Whilst this doesn't immediately heal all, it does help Patrick realise that forgiveness, something that has been eluding him for years, might not be necessary after all; perhaps a simple acknowledgement and acceptance of the person his father was, and of what had shaped him, was enough. Various characters from the previous two novels in the series return, some quite surprising. Bridget, who was a pretty but common girl brought along to France as the sexual plaything of the contemptible Nicholas Pratt (and so he is) in the first book, reappears after a society marriage as the hostess of the chic party central to Some Hope. Her husband, Sonny Gravesend, has been having an affair that everyone knows about and which will come to a head at the party itself. One of Patrick's acquaintances from the drug years returns in a very unexpected cameo. And the French ambassador to England has an embarrassing and very public moment when he accidentally spills sauce from the dinner he is eating over Princess Margaret's dress and is required by Her Highness herself to kneel before her and clean it up, in front of everybody.

Critics have compared St Aubyn's brilliantly sardonic comic writing to Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene - or an English Philip Roth. Certainly he has a sensational power to paint vivid pictures in the mind, and to draw memorable characters. It is increasingly clear as the series progresses that St Aubyn is also deeply interested in the notion of identity, what it means and where it comes from. Patrick is the perfect vehicle within which to explore this theme, and I look forward to seeing where he takes us next. At the end of this book we are left - as the title would suggest - feeling that there might be some hope for Patrick after all.

Overall assessment: 3.5 out of 5 - not quite the same level, for me, as the earlier two novels in this series, but fascinating nonetheless, and certainly this book does not detract from the genius of the enterprise as an entirety.

Pros / favourite passages: Patrick's obsession with and difficulty escaping from the legacy of his father is brilliantly portrayed. "The memory of his father still hypnotized him and drew him like a sleepwalker towards a precipice of unwilling emulation." "He wanted to break into a wider world, to learn something, to make a difference. Above all, he wanted to stop being a child without using the cheap disguise of becoming a parent." "How could he find any firm ground when his identity seemed to begin with disintegration and go on to disintegrate further? But perhaps this whole model of identity was misconceived. Perhaps identity was not a building for which one had to find foundations, but rather a series of impersonations held together by a central intelligence, an intelligence that knew the history of the impersonations and eliminated the distinction between action and acting." "What could he do but accept the disturbing extent to which memory was fictional and hope that the fiction lay at the service of a truth less richly represented by the original facts?"

On telling the truth about what happened to him as a child: "But which words could he use? All his life he'd used words to distract attention from this deep inarticulacy, this unspeakable emotion which he would now have to use words to describe. How could they avoid being noisy and tactless, like a gaggle of children laughing under the bedroom window of a dying man?"

Cons: The narration here moved awfully quickly and for me prevented a full surrender to the story until quite late in the book.

Also, and this is not really a con, but an observation of something I find troubling: these people are awful towards their children! After the wry observations by David Melrose and Nicholas Pratt in Never Mind, here Bridget represents stiff-upper-lip British parenting: she leaves her young child with a brutal nanny and refuses to spend time with her. She is also awful towards her own mother, which, as a mother myself, I found somewhat hard to believe - if there is anything motherhood teaches you, it is how much you owe your own parents! Interestingly St Aubyn uses the notion of attentive parenting to define Bridget's turn-around towards the end of the book: when she finally, bravely decides to walk out on her appalling husband (at least temporarily), she takes her daughter with her, and her mother, leaving the nanny behind. Perhaps there is hope here, too, although what is fascinating is that this move simultaneously represents a return from upper-class society back to the common origins from which Bridget stems. As though St Aubyn is telling us that belonging to the upper crust of British society is mutually exclusive with real emotion, with genuinely close family relations, with loving one's children.