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Wall Street Journal
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
Fiction: ‘Parallel Lines' by Edward St. Aubyn
Edward St. Aubyn's five-book cycle, the Patrick Melrose novels, published between 1992 and 2011 and now widely recognized as a classic of British literature, covers a lot of territory in the chronicle of its magnetically messed-up hero. Childhood trauma, addiction, euthanasia and the concealed cruelties of the English aristocracy count among its darkest preoccupations. Mr. St. Aubyn is equally obsessed with psychoanalysis and ethical philosophy, inheritance and spirituality, and the torment of trying to distill such mysteries into meaningful language. The novels veer breathtakingly from gonzo druggie farce to exquisite manor-house satire to earnest talking-cure confessionals, relying on the diamantine luster of the prose to hold them all together. You should read them, is what I'm saying. Less obviously, the books are also instances of what the critic Marco Roth has labeled 'neuronovels': fiction interested in the brain's relation to behavior and personality. 'Never Mind' (1992), the first book in the series, turns on the first time that Patrick, at 5 years old, is sexually abused by his sadistic father. During the violation he feels himself 'split in half,' so that part of his consciousness is stuck in the moment of violence and part seems to have escaped his body to seek distraction in anything else. The mental rupture defines his coming of age. In an indelible scene from his drug-addled 20s in 'Bad News' (1992), Patrick has a full-fledged schizophrenic episode when his brain is colonized by a 'bacteria of voices.' The depictions of his fragmentation, and his long, arduous struggle toward unity, are so precise and vivid that they could serve as neuropsychology case studies. The brain and its role as the seat of consciousness continue as fixations in the fitfully successful novels Mr. St. Aubyn has published outside the Melrose series, the best of which are 'Double Blind' (2021) and its sequel, 'Parallel Lives.' Science is confronted far more technically in these pendant works, whose decentralized cast, spread mostly between Britain and the U.S., allows the omnivorous author to indulge in an exploratory sprawl of ideas. Among the characters established in 'Double Blind' is the billionaire venture capitalist Hunter Sterling, who has begun investing in futuristic biotech innovations such as 'Happy Helmets,' which reproduce in their wearers' brains the neurological states of, for instance, business leaders or religious gurus. Yet that very cerebral plasticity is a source of crisis for Hunter's love interest, Lucy, who in her 30s is diagnosed with a brain tumor and ushered into a life of cancer treatments.
The Herald Scotland
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
The man who brought Scotland's beavers back: 10 books to read next
Parallel lines Edward St Aubyn Jonathan Cape, £20 From the author of the acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels, a novel about dysfunctional families and the reverberations of fateful decisions. It opens in a psychiatric hospital where Sebastian is recovering from a break-down. His therapist also has problems, including the behaviour of his adopted daughter Olivia, who turns out to be Sebastian's sister. A poignant, unsettling exploration of unexpected consequences and connections. Benedict Cumberbatch as Patrick Melrose, in the TV adaptation of the series of novels written by Edward St. Aubyn (Image: Showtime/Sky) Ingrained Callum Robinson Penguin, £10.99 A one-off memoir, with a unique charm, now available in paperback. As a boy, Robinson learned how to work with wood from his father, but it was not until he was a young man that his extraordinary talent emerged. Not that this made for an easy life. Revealing the personal struggle behind his professional success – and the perpetual dread of failure – Ingrained is a hymn to wood, to craftsmanship, and to the joy of making things that people and their descendants will cherish. The Propagandist Cécile Desprairies, trans Natasha Lehrer Swift, £14.99 A disturbing autobiographical novel from a respected French historian. The story of a child whose family's war-time collaboration turns the house into a nest of lies and unspoken fears, it is a truly shocking portrait of eager - in some cases fanatical – collaboration. The narrator's mother, the propagandist of the title, was so skilfully manipulative, she was nicknamed the Leni Riefenstahl of the poster. Despriaries' unflinching account makes uncomfortable reading especially, one suspects, for a nation that has still fully to address the whitewashing of many who were ideologically aligned with their Nazi occupiers. Germans parade on the Champs-Elyses in Paris, during the Occupation. (Photo by Albert Harlingue/) (Image:) Is a River Alive? Robert Macfarlane Hamish Hamilton, £25 This lyrical and mystical exploration of the river suggests that rivers are alive in the same sense as we are - an idea that raises serious legal and political questions. This provocative book, Macfarlane writes, has been 'co-authored' by the rivers he discusses, rivers he calls 'who' not 'which'. Showcasing endangered examples on different continents – Ecuador, south-eastern India and Canada - Is a River Alive? is an urgent call to raise awareness of the dangers facing the world's rivers, and an attempt to encourage us to view them as sentient entities worthy of care and protection. The Book of Records Madeleine Thien Granta, £20 Canadian-born novelist Madeleine Thien admits that her latest book is 'a strange work'. It is also beautifully written. It opens with a Chinese father and his young daughter, Lina, finding themselves in a place known as The Sea. A ramshackle assortment of buildings, The Sea is where migrants and the displaced pause before continuing on their way. There is a peculiar feeling about this community, because it is made up of different times, with a 17th-century Dutch academic and a 1930s German philosopher living as neighbours. Lina's father knows he does not have long to live, and tries to prepare his daughter for her future. A beguiling novel about how to live a good life, and the role of history in our everyday. Read more Mona Acts Out Mischa Berlinski Summit Books, £16.99 A witty but insightful day-in-the-life story of an actor in crisis. Mona is having trouble with her doctor husband, and her irksome in-laws have colonised their Manhattan apartment. In a few weeks she'll be giving the performance of her life as Shakespeare's Cleopatra, a terrifying prospect for a woman of such fragile self-confidence. On impulse, she heads out, ostensibly for shopping, to visit her old acting mentor. Mona Acts Out describes that brief but transformative escape. An engaging, bittersweet novel. Foreign Fruit, A Personal History of the Orange Katie Goh, Canongate, £16.99 By tracing the history of the orange, which first was grown in China, Katie Goh also explores her own origins. Raised in Northern Ireland, and now living in Edinburgh, her family roots lie in China and Malaysia. Her search to understand her identity moves in tandem with this intriguing account of the orange and its cultural and economic significance down the millennia. An emotionally honest memoir that embraces colonialism, migration and capitalism and much else. Albion by Anna Hope (Image: free) Albion Anna Hope Fig Tree, £16.99 On the death of Philip, the patriarch of the Brookes family, the ancestral 18th-century pile will be passed on to his heirs. After half a century of miserable married life, Philip's widow can't wait to leave, but for their children prospect of inhering the house and its enormous estate is tantalising. One is keen to rewild, another hopes it will become the crucible for a new ruling class, while for a third it represents a chance to reunite with a childhood love. A sensitively-written family saga that encapsulates the state of society today. The Search for Othella Savage Foday Mannah Quercus, 16.99 Foday Mannah's debut novel is a crime story, based on a real case, in which women from the Sierra Leone community in Edinburgh go missing or are found murdered. When Othella Savage, the best friend of politics student Hawa, disappears, Hawa suspects the Lion Mountain Church they attend in Leith holds the answer. From the start, its pastor has made her uneasy. Set between Scotland and Sierra Leone, and recounted in a breezy style, despite its dark and dramatic plot, The Search for Othella Savage illuminates a different Edinburgh from that usually found in the city's detective fiction.
New York Times
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Dispatches From the Psych Ward Fuel This Ebullient Novel
'My funny Guillotine … sweet, comic Guillotine,' he sings. Also: 'Pill-cutter, pill-cutter, cut me a pill.' And: 'Senator Krupke, I'm down on my knees, because nobody wants a fellow with a mental disease.' This is Sebastian, the ebullient schizophrenic at the center of 'Parallel Lines,' the new, uneven Edward St. Aubyn novel. Sebastian is a preposterously winning fictional creation. He owes a debt to Randle McMurphy in Ken Kesey's 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,' to Lionel Essrog, the private detective with Tourette's Syndrome in Jonathan Lethem's 'Motherless Brooklyn' and to some of the motormouth talkers in Philip Roth's fiction. Sometimes the radio station in Sebastian's head is tuned to the dark, self-loathing feed that the writer Tommy Tomlinson has called USUCK-FM. But more often, the songs emerge as delirious patter. He hopes to get out of the mental hospital where he's been placed after a dramatic episode and become 'an ambulatory schizophrenic, whistling 'Carmen,' as he ambulated down the boulevards, a cane in one hand and a tuft of hair in the other. 'Torre adore! la di-da di-da.'' Sebastian was formed, in large part, on the anvil of childhood trauma. This is a quality that links him with Patrick Melrose, the protagonist of St. Aubyn's best-known work — the five interconnected novels sometimes referred to as the Melrosiad, or, as the author prefers, the Melroses. Most of the resemblances between Seb and Patrick stop there. St. Aubyn crashed out of the gate with those wicked Melrose novels, in the same manner Karl Ove Knausgaard did with his 'My Struggle' series. Both writers have experienced what seems to be an identity crisis since those defining peaks. Each is a vastly talented novelist working out what kind of writer he now wants to be. For St. Aubyn, one answer was provided in his last novel, 'Double Blind' (2021). Among its subjects, I wrote at the time, were brain-mapping, biochemistry, immunotherapy, schizophrenia and the ethics of placebos. 'Parallel Lines' is a sequel (oh no) to that novel. You don't have to have read 'Double Blind' to swallow this one. The same large cast is here, caught up with a few years later, just after the worst of Covid. The setting, most of the time, is London. There are shrinks, people making radio programs about the varieties of approaching Armageddon, portentous land and light artists, a woman fighting cancer, a boy named Noah with an ark, estranged twins, a billionaire who is almost palatable despite what is called his 'belligerent hospitality,' a priest or two, and an awful mother named (what else?) Karen. The topics on the table this time — indeed, this novel reads like bright table talk — include the nature of psychoanalysis ('a form of literary criticism in which the text is the subconscious'), patronage, compassion burnout, dietary virtue, developments in oncology, faith, coffee, dinosaurs, conceptual art and Donald Trump as sociopath and narcissist. The primary theme, however, is connection — synchronicity, surges of coincidence, twinning, mirroring, whatever you want to label it, all coming together 'like a bride having her hair braided before a wedding.' St. Aubyn finds links and associations everywhere; every corner of the known universe heaves with layers of meaning. St. Aubyn is worth reading, nearly all the time, because his novels contain brutal and funny intellectual content. He's a briny writer, one who dispatches a stream of salty commentary, sentences that whoosh past like arrows: His men and women, most of them comfortably off, worry if the barbarism of the age can be redeemed while worrying about their own small, boutique barbarisms. They are trying to save what's savable, inside and out, from a world on fire. St. Aubyn's talents are mighty, so much so that you wonder why this novel, and its predecessor, aren't even better than they are. 'Parallel Lines' is a high-level entertainment, but it's so incident- and idea-packed that nothing quite sticks. St. Aubyn can be as philosophically acute as Iris Murdoch but, unlike her fiction, you're rarely aware of the hull below the brightly painted watertight deck. 'Parallel Lines' lacks a certain earthiness; you never sense the blood flowing under its characters' hair. What about Sebastian? He's the primary reason to be here. He rips into the Jam song 'That's Entertainment!' at the least appropriate moments. He wishes that, like a cow, he could stomach anything. He calls his shrink of five years his 'psycho-nanny-lyst.' Placed in the hospital's Suicide Observation Room, he comments that 'with a name like that, you would have thought it would be stuffed with pistols and daggers and grenades and cyanide capsules.' Even though he is fully grown, the reader half wants to adopt him. Like a Shakespearean comedy, 'Parallel Lines' builds up to a big coming-together, this time in an art gallery, with most of the major characters crammed into a small space. In the penultimate sentence, someone says, 'To be continued.' Are these novels destined to become part of a trilogy? I'd probably read a third one, but I get paid for this.
Times
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
A tale from the psychiatric ward — Edward St Aubyn's new novel
It takes an admirable level of single-mindedness to write a sequel nobody was clamouring for, to a novel that was almost universally panned, but then Edward St Aubyn has always been a one-of-a-kind talent. He gave us the five brilliant, funny, painful Patrick Melrose novels, inspired by his own life — but he has also given us five other novels that, if they didn't actually stink the place out, were certainly pretty whiffy. His previous novel, Double Blind, was a rambling string of ideas in search of a story, with too many characters who were just mouthpieces for theories on ecology, venture capitalism, medicine and more. And his new book, Parallel Lines, picks up where that one left off. Could it possibly be
