At Last (St. Aubyn)

At Last  (Patrick Melrose Series, 5)
Edward St. Aubyn, 2012
Picador : Macmillan
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250023902


Summary
Here, from the writer described by The Guardian as “our purest living prose stylist” and whom Alan Hollinghurst has called “the most brilliant English novelist of his generation,” is a work of glittering social comedy, profound emotional truth, and acute verbal wit. At Last is also the stunning culmination of one of the great fiction enterprises of the past two decades in the life of the English novel.

As readers of Edward St. Aubyn's extraordinary earlier works—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and the Man Booker Prize finalist Mother's Milk—are well aware, for Patrick Melrose, “family” has always been a double-edged sword. At Last begins as friends, relatives, and foes trickle in to pay final respects to his mother, Eleanor. An Americam heiress, Eleanor married into the British aristocracy, giving up the grandeur of her upbringing for “good works” freely bestowed on everyone but her own son, who finds himself questioning whether his transition to a life without parents will indeed be the liberation he had so long imagined.

The service ends, and family and friends gather for a final party. Amid the social niceties and social horrors, Patrick begins to sense the prospect of release from the extremes of his childhood, and at the end of the day, alone in his room, the promise some form of safety...at last. (From the publisher.)

The four previous novels in the series—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk—have been collected in a single volume in the U.S., titled The Patrick Melrose Novels.

Author Bio
• Birth—January 14, 1960
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Betty Trask Award; Prix Femina
   Etranger; South Bank Show Award;
• Currently—lives in London, England


Edward St Aubyn was born in London in 1960. He was educated at Westminster school and Keble college, Oxford University. He is the author of seven novels of which Mother’s Milk was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, won the 2007 Prix Femina Etranger and won the 2007 South Bank Show award on literature.

His first novel, Never Mind (1992) won the Betty Trask award. This novel, along with Bad News (1992), Some Hope (1994), and Mother's Milk (2005) have been collectively published under the title The Patrick Melrose Novels. The series is semi-autobiographical.

His other fiction consists of On the Edge (1998), which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize, and A Clue to the Exit (2000).

The Patrick Melrose series
The series begins with Never Mind (1992) in Patrick’s fifth year in a mansion in the South of France. It paints a picture of his father as a monstrous member of the fading English nobility who believes in suave public school (elite English boarding school) cruelty and that a truly noble man is languid. It is revealed that Patrick was the product of rape and that at this mansion his father raped him, not for any sexual pleasure but out of mere insatiable cruelty.

In the second book, Bad News (1992), Patrick is in his early 20s, reveling in a heroin addiction, and in New York to collect his father’s ashes. The novel portrays Patrick’s searches and highs and avoidance of the significance of his father’s death and the vague pleasure he gets from it.

In Some Hope (1994), Patrick is recovering from his addiction, finally admits to a friend about his father’s actions towards him in his childhood and goes to a party which is also attended by Princess Margaret where St Aubyn gets to sketch an absurd upper class.

In Mother’s Milk (2005) Patrick has a family and children. His mother, who in his childhood victimized him through inaction, now actively victimizes him through having an insatiable need to be charitable and effectively disinheriting Patrick by giving away the family home he grew up in to a new age religion foundation. He descends to a lower class than that of his ancestors and works as a lawyer.

If Mother’s Milk is about the wonders of birth and early childhood, At Last (2012) is a meditation on death. In the final instalment of the series his midlife crisis has caused his wife to leave him and his horrible mother has died. He finally deals with and accepts his history.

In 2012 Mother's Milk was made into a feature film, opening in the UK to some excellent reviews in publications such as the Guardian, Sight & Sound and the Observer. The screenplay was written by St Aubyn and director Gerald Fox. It stars Jack Davenport, Adrian Dunbar, Diana Quick and Margaret Tyzack in her last performance. (Author bio adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
The thing that everyone loves about this man...is that his prose has an easy charm that masks a ferocious, searching intellect. As a sketcher of character, his wit—whether turned against pointless members of the aristocracy or hopeless crack dealers—is ticklingly wicked. As an analyser of broken minds and tired hearts he is as energetic, careful and creative as the perfect shrink. And when it comes to spinning a good yarn, whether over the grand scale of three volumes or within a single page of anecdote, he has a natural talent for keeping you on the edge of your seat.... [An] amazing book.
Melissa Katsoulis - London Times


St. Aubyn’s technique is to crystallise emotional intensity into sentences of arctic beauty, which can be caustically witty or brutal. His novels are uncommonly well controlled, and thus their impact is all the more powerful…. In At Last this crystallisation and control are on glittering display…. We have reached the pinnacle of a series that has plunged into darkness and risen towards light. At Last is both resounding end and hopeful beginning.
Philip Womack - Telegraph (UK)


For fans of the Melrose cycle, At Last provides some of the exultation and relief of watching [a] sailor, so often nearly drowned, bob, gasping, to the surface…if this is, as St. Aubyn's publisher claims, the "culmination" of the Melrose cycle, we can only wish Patrick well and be thankful that his travails have furnished the material for some of the most perceptive, elegantly written and hilarious novels of our era.
Francine Prose - New York Times Book Review


[T]he final installment of a remarkable cycle of novels…which chronicle the life of Mr. St. Aubyn's alter ego, Patrick, while creating a glittering (and scathing) portrait of the upper-class British world his family inhabits. The books are written with an utterly idiosyncratic combination of emotional precision, crystalline observation and black humor, as if one of Evelyn Waugh's wicked satires about British aristos had been mashed up with a searing memoir of abuse and addiction, and injected with Proustian meditations on the workings of memory and time…the Melrose books underscore [St. Aubyn's] gift for lassoing the extremes of human experience in coolly chiseled language; for using irony and exactitude to reconfigure the raw, painful facts of life into an art that somehow manages to be affecting, alarming and, yes, amusing, all at the same time.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times


St. Aubyn writes with exquisite control and a brilliant comic touch.... An intelligent and surprisingly hopeful novel, a fitting conclusion to one of the best fictional cycles in contemporary fiction.
Anthony Domestico - Boston Globe


[O]ne of the most amazing reading experiences I've had in a decade. After all the suffering and torment and despair that Patrick Melrose has been through over the years, [St. Aubyn] leaves him in a very interesting place, and he does it all with his incredible examination of the sweep of time and the way our understanding of people changes over decades. All of that is done with this incredible, biting, witty, hilarious prose style, the elegant, classic English sentences that he writes and these amazing put-downs, and he's great at dissecting an entire social world with a really wicked scalpel.
Michael Chabon - Los Angeles Times


St. Aubyn’s skill with characterization, his dissection of how a personality warps, settles, or improves over time, is nowhere more evident than in his aging of Patrick, whose mood and mental state are a gauge for the tone of each novel.... At Last is far less dramatic than any previous Melrose book, although the humor and perfectly observed dialogue remain. Its calm is entirely suited to the wisdom Patrick Melrose has painfully, finally earned.
Victoria Beale - New Republic


It's tough competition for the most-underrated writer in the English language—there's plenty of neglect to go around—but if you put a Colt Commander to my head, I might well say it's St. Aubyn, the chronically under-published chronicler of abuse, dysfunction, alcoholism and worse in the English upper classes. At Last is the  final novel, one thinks, in his series about his alter ego, the neurotic Patrick Melrose. It's pretty much a lock to be one of the funniest, saddest, most beautiful books of the year.
Lev Grossman - Time


In this fifth and final book in St. Aubyn's "Patrick Melrose" series, ...Patrick attends the funeral of his mother, who died after a lingering illness.... As his story ends, we find him reexamining his life. Can he connect with his sons? He would never hurt them as his father hurt him, but he is hurting them just the same by being so remote. Verdict: This well-written work has dark undertones and subtle, cutting humor, like an Augusten Burroughs novel with less zaniness and more cruelty. For those willing to tackle an emotionally difficult, unflinching narrative. —Shaunna Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA
Library Journal


With this title, St. Aubyn caps his five-volume cycle of Melrose novels. ...[E]vents in At Last take place over the course of a single day; in this case, the day of Patrick’s mother’s funeral. Despite his loss and his reduced circumstances...Patrick has “at last” found a measure of peace. With lacerating humor and razor-sharp imagery, St. Aubyn continues to work out his themes: the follies of the British upper class, “the psychological impact of inherited wealth,” the complex dynamics between parent and child. —Mary Ellen Quinn
Booklist


A London funeral stirs up a lot of memories but few epiphanies in this British author's latest, which concludes [the Patrick Melrose] trilogy.... Now, after two mute years in a wheelchair, his mother Eleanor has died, making Patrick a 45-year-old orphan. The action, such as it is, covers the crematorium funeral and subsequent reception; mixed in are family memories.... Patrick, more forgiving now, sees his "supposed persecutors," his parents, as "unhappy children" themselves. It's a curious conclusion. St. Aubyn tries for a Muriel Spark kind of black comedy but lacks her finesse.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Edward St. Aubyn describes Patrick as being torn between the lure of consolation and the lure of disappointment. Why does he find those options alluring? What aspects of a powerful, albeit masochistic, bond are captured in the fact that he mourns not the loss of his mother but the loss of longing for closeness to her?

2. Why does Nicholas derive pleasure from being snarky? In the book's opening scenes, was it fun or annoying to see him creating tension, on what should have been a somber occasion? At the end of the novel, do people react to his closing chapter with phoniness or candor?

3. Discuss Eleanor's marriage to David and what we learn about it in this novel. Why was she unable to choose between being his collaborator and his antagonist when it came to raising Patrick?

4. Patrick contemplates Eleanor's emotional legacy throughout her funeral. What legacies will he leave for Robert and Thomas? How is he able to break the cycle of his family's cruelty?

5. Discuss Annette's observations about Eleanor's spiritual side, delivered in a fairly lengthy eulogy. How does Annette's depiction compare to other impressions of Eleanor? What would Eleanor have thought of these spiritual philosophies, and those that Erasmus continues to ponder throughout the service?

6. What does Nancy's spending say about her memories of Jean, her stepfather? Why can't Nancy simply accept the reality of her situation? Why is the myth of endless wealth important for her to uphold?

7. St. Aubyn has spoken candidly with interviewers about the horrific incidents from his own life that inspired aspects of Patrick's story, including being brutalized by his father and recovering from drug addiction. How does it affect your reading to know that the plot is partially autobiographical?

8. What makes St. Aubyn a master of the art of gallows humor? Why are morbid subjects and despicable people often the best material for comedy?

9. On page 262, the author describes Patrick as getting comfortable with Keatsian mysteries, finally open to questions that can't necessarily be answered. What questions in your life and legacy can't really be answered? How could you make peace with this uncertainty?

10. Discuss the author's notion that those who appear to deserve the most blame actually deserve the most help. When is this true in the novel, and in your own life?

11. Why was it easy for Eleanor to give charitably to strangers but not to her own family and staff? What does her generosity say about her personality? What were some of the most striking differences between her public and private personae?

12. How does the transatlantic connection enhance At Last? What is Patrick's perspective on America, and how is his identity shaped by knowing about Eleanor's grandfather Jonson? Why was Southern culture meaningful to Eleanor? Did her image of it extend very far beyond the stereotypes of Porgy and Bess?

13. In At Last, how do Patrick's interactions with Mary, his wife, compare to his interactions with Julia, his former girlfriend? Is his attitude toward women different now that his mother is gone?

14. Discuss the transformations that Patrick has experienced in the Melrose novels you have read previously. He has evolved from anger and addiction to middle-age crises; what has he become in this final portrait?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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