Patrick Melrose Novels (St. Aubyn)

The Patrick Melrose Novels  (Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk)
Edward St. Aubyn, 2012
Picador : Macmillan
688 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312429966


Summary
For more than twenty years, acclaimed author Edward St. Aubyn has chronicled the life of Patrick Melrose, painting an extraordinary portrait of the beleaguered and self-loathing world of privilege. This single volume collects the first four novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk, a Man Booker finalist—to coincide with the publication of At Last, the final installment of this unique novel cycle.

By turns harrowing and hilarious, these beautifully written novels dissect the English upper class as we follow Patrick Melrose’s story from child abuse to heroin addiction and recovery. Never Mind, the first novel, unfolds over a day and an evening at the family’s chateaux in the south of France, where the sadistic and terrifying figure of David Melrose dominates the lives of his five-year-old son, Patrick, and his rich and unhappy American mother, Eleanor.

From abuse to addiction, the second novel, Bad News opens as the twenty-two-year-old Patrick sets off to collect his father’s ashes from New York, where he will spend a drug-crazed twenty-four hours. And back in England, the third novel, Some Hope, offers a sober and clean Patrick the possibility of recovery. The fourth novel, the Booker-shortlisted Mother’s Milk, returns to the family chateau, where Patrick, now married and a father himself, struggles with child rearing, adultery, his mother’s desire for assisted suicide, and the loss of the family home to a New Age foundation.

Edward St. Aubyn offers a window into a world of utter decadence, amorality, greed, snobbery, and cruelty—welcome to the declining British aristocracy. (From the publisher.)

The fifth and final volume in the series, At Last, was published as a stand-alone in 2012.

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
Like Waugh, St. Aubyn writes with exquisite control and a brilliant comic touch…Patrick often seems like a Philip Roth hero transplanted into a world of English privilege… The Patrick Melrose Series forms an exhaustive study of cruelty: its varieties, its motivations, its consequences, its moral implications.
Boston Globe


Implausibly brilliant speech… The striking gap between, on the one hand, the elegant polish of the narration, the silver rustle of these exquisite sentences, the poised narrowness of the social satire and, on the other hand, the screaming pain of the family violence inflicted on Patrick makes these books some of the strangest of contemporary novels …This prose, whose repressed English control is admired by everyone from Alan Hollinghurst to Will Self, is drawn inexorably back to a fearful instability, to the nakedness of infancy.
James Wood - The New Yorker


Coinciding with the publication of At Last, this omnibus edition shows that St. Aubyn’s five Patrick Melrose novels may well constitute one of the most ambitious novel cycles since Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. Where Powell wrote about a wide swath of 20th-century English social history, St. Aubyn’s milieu is more focused and constrained, detailing the life of the scion of the eccentric, wealthy, and cruel David and Eleanor Melrose.... This cycle is no ordinary family saga, or even that of an extraordinary family (which the Melrose clan certainly is); plot summaries don’t touch on St. Aubyn’s gift. Though the author has clearly mined his own experience, he has refined it into something exquisite, an exploration of consciousness and the journey from the helplessness of childhood to “the pure inevitability of things being as they were,” as elegant a definition of acceptance as anyone is likely to write. And his serious purpose is buoyed by an abundant wit, laugh-out-loud funniness, and piercing observations into the world of privilege and entitlement.
Publishers Weekly


This volume introduces American readers to the first four Melrose novels—Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother’s Milk—published in Great Britian from 1992 to 2006.... Mother’s Milk was a Man Booker finalist, making this volume especially welcome for readers who savor literary British fiction. —Mary Ellen Quinn
Booklist


A brew of romans a clef set amid a sparklingly decadent upper-crust English background, the novels are a mordant portrait of a class that St. Aubyn loathes but is undeniably his own. In each novel we read a kind of status report on Patrick's progress, one in which his growing desire to come to grips with his legacy and the shadow of maturity does battle with a pathological case of self-loathing, an appetite for sex and self-medication. Bleak as the material may sound, the Melrose novels are modern masterworks of social comedy.
Eric Banks - Book Forum

Discussion Questions
1. Why does Eleanor submit to David in Never Mind? Does he submit to anything (other than the memory of his father)?

2. As five-year-old Patrick is being brutalized by his father in chapter seven, how does his imagination rescue him? What effect does this have on his perception of reality in the subsequent books?

3. In the closing passages of Never Mind, Eleanor watches Bridget clumsily try to escape for a tryst with Barry, "just going down the drive as if she were free” (page 129). If it weren’t for the re of money and status, would all the primary characters be free?

4. What makes Edward St. Aubyn’s depiction of addiction in Bad News unique? How did you react as you watched Patrick juggle Quaaludes, speed, and heroin, culminating in the other world of the Key Club?

5. What various comforts do Anne, George, and Pierre offer Patrick after he comes face-to-face with his father’s “misplaced” corpse?

6. In Some Hope, Princess Margaret natters on about child abuse, atheism, the failure of socialism, the charms of Noël Coward, and the ways in which the ambassador’s sauce splatter is a sign of egregious disrespect for the crown. In this infamous party scene, is she the only one being spoofed?

7. Patrick tells Anne that his grandmother’s Great War diary (page 429) led him to believe that his father was sexually abused as a child. Did you agree with Patrick or with Anne as they debated the role of forgiveness?

8. What was it like to experience birth from wise Robert’s point of view in Mother’s Milk? How do Robert and Thomas complete St. Aubyn’s meditation on sons and mothers?

9. The quartet ends with Patrick in the role of parent as his mother confronts euthanasia (after signing over Saint-Nazaire to the Foundation). What did Eleanor teach him about women? How do these lessons play out  with Julia and Mary?

10. St. Aubyn gives us recurring images of an Alsatian dog chasing Patrick (page 132 and 511) and describes David as “no more endearing than a chained Alsatian” (page 156). Who and what continue to hound Patrick long after his father’s death?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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