Reviewers this week flexed their intellectual muscles as they got to grips with clever clogs Edward St Aubyn’s latest novel. His roman-a-clef At Last was a double boon: the perfect opportunity not only to indulge in a spot of sordid literary gossip but also to parade their mastery of the Literae Humaniores. And in numbers as mighty as the Achaeans swarming on Trojan plains, they did both. Caroline Moore in the Telegraph tried to trump the account of childhood rape – which almost became banal when trotted out in every single review – with this biographical anecdote:
“He turned up to sit his Oxford finals armed with the shaft of an empty Biro for snorting heroin, but without a conventionally filled pen.”
Otherwise the antics of the St Aubyn’s family, a clan who, according to Philip Womack in the Telegraph, could “compete with the House of Atreus in terms of neuroses” provided, like Tityos’ liver in the Sibyl’s hellish vision (Aen.VI. 600, if you’re asking), meaty issues on which scavenger critics could feast. The Observer’s Adam Mars-Jones expanded:
“St Aubyn’s literary career had two not quite synchronised beginnings. In conventional terms it started with the publication of his first book Never Mind (1992) … In another it started the moment he answered an interviewer’s question by saying that Patrick Melrose, the five-year-old boy raped by his father in that book, was – in that respect at least – a self-portrait.”
However, in his TLS review, Henry Hitchings was admirably sensitive. Not only did he not refer to the rape explicitly but he coyly only focused on the book itself – “archly cerebral, half-amused, and surreptitiously humane” – till half way through the review. Indeed, he seemed to think, the “Stygian”, as he put it, character of Patrick Melrose’s cameos in A Clue to the Exit and On the Edge provided for discussion as fertile a territory as the unploughed valleys coursing with rivers of milk and nectar in Ovid’s Golden Age.
St Aubyn has now written five novels centred on his hero. The central three of these commencing with the infamous “miasma” constituted what James Lasdun in the Guardian then termed a “blackly comic Anglo-Saxon Oresteia” while the pendant novels Mother’s Milk and At Last metamorphosed the oeuvre into the “Melrosiad” (yes, he did “dare say it”). And in case we didn’t get the point, he added: “For all their brilliant social satire, they are closer to the tight, ritualistic poetic drama of another era than the expansive comic fiction of our own.” (One only hopes he hasn’t read Aeschylus solely in the translation.)
Everyone was impressed that the tragedy steered clear of the misery-memoir; Caroline Moore again proved Promethean in her quest to illustrate adequately St Aubyn’s restraint:
“St Aubyn steers resolutely away from the Scylla of self-pity – as strenuously as he attempts to resist the pull of the Charybdis of self-loathing.”
She also noted that though “All this sounds very grim; and it may be difficult to persuade readers who are deterred”, the author still rose to the Lucretian feat of rendering the bitter truth palatable: “St Aubyn’s fiction triumphs, partly because he writes so well. His style is crisp and light; his similes exhilarating in their accuracy.” Compared to the other critics’ unanimous acclaim, however, the Spectator’s James Walton was as cantankerous as a Menandrian father-in-law: “The trouble is that the longer the book goes on, the more the jokes and raging exuberance give way to chunks of Patrick’s largely humourless psychological introspection.”
Despite that dissonant voice in the chorus, Edward St Aubyn was applauded across the board. Infamous for an intellect sharper than Caucasian crags and a wit that could have been suckled by Hyrcanian tigresses, reviewers rushed to do it justice with their own verbal Odysseys. He is a “writer’s writer” after all.
Fleur Macdonald is editor of the Omnivore, which rounds up book, film and theatre reviews from newspapers, and she also volunteers at the charity Classics for All.
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