Laura's Review - The Patrick Melrose Novels, by Edward St Aubyn

The Patrick Melrose Novels is a 680-page omnibus of four works by Edward St. Aubyn, originally published between 1992 and 2005: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk. A fifth novel, At Last, was published in 2012. Each book covers a period in Patrick's life, often only a day or two, spread out over four decades.

In Never Mind, Patrick is five years old and living in France with his British father and American mother. This tightly written novella tells you all you need to know about David and Eleanor Melrose, and it's not pretty. David is an overbearing, sadistic man; Eleanor and Patrick are victims of his cruelty. Towards the end of the novella, something unthinkable happens, and you know Patrick will be scarred for life. In the following books you can see Patrick trying, mostly in vain, to move beyond this childhood trauma. In Bad News, 22-year-old Patrick has taken to drugs and is constantly in search of his next hit. By age 30, in Some Hope, he has given up drugs (or has he?), and is making an effort to address long-term psychological issues. 

Have you seen the amazing "Up" documentary series? Bear with me, there's a point to this digression. In the documentaries, director Michael Apted visits the same group of British-born people every 7 years, beginning at age 7 (the latest installment, 56 Up, was released in 2012 and will soon arrive in US cinemas -- see it if you can). The Patrick Melrose Novels share a similar premise, taken from the Jesuit motto, "Give me a child until he is seven and I will give you the man." Like the documentaries, each novel gives us a glimpse into Patrick's life at a point in time. We know little about the intervening period. But the events in Never Mind are like a thread woven through Patrick's life, influencing everything he says and does, and the man he becomes.

By the time we get to Mother's Milk, Patrick is 40, married, with children. He's a devoted father with stable employment. You might think he's living the dream, right? Well, no. Patrick's aging mother has pretty much disinherited him by making increasingly irresponsible decisions about her estate. Patrick's well-being teeters on a precipice; not surprisingly, we see some backsliding into destructive behaviors. The scars from Never Mind have never healed.

When I picked up this book my original intention was to read the first novella and return to the others later. Instead I found myself drawn into Patrick's story, despite the fact that nearly every character is unlikable in the extreme. The writing is harsh and direct; St Aubyn doesn't sugar coat the situation in any way. It was all so unpleasant! And yet something kept me coming back for the next installment, hoping to see Patrick in a better place with each passing decade. I did have one quibble with the writing, however. Mother's Milk is told largely through the thoughts, words and deeds of Patrick's very young sons. Their voices didn't ring true; I've never met a preschooler who could think or speak in such a sophisticated way.  

Mother's Milk was nominated for the 2006 Booker Prize, and because of that I nearly made the mistake of reading it as a standalone novel. I don't think you can appreciate it unless you've read the three previous books. Perhaps the Booker judges were recognizing a body of work more than an individual novel?



Cross-posted from my blog

Laura's Review - Carry me Down, by M.J. Hyland

Creating an effective child narrator is a difficult task. Whatever their age, they need to be credible. If the child's speech sounds too old for their age, or they handle situations that are overly complex or physically impossible, that's not credible. Carry me Down is narrated by 10-year-old John Egan, and while his speech and inner thoughts sounded about right, his actions didn't always ring true for me and this significantly affected my impressions of this book.

Early in the novel, John becomes physically ill after catching one of his parents in a lie. Over time he uncovers more lies, first with similar results but later he is able to detect lies without getting sick. John becomes convinced he has a special gift for lie detection, and obsesses about getting into the Guinness Book of World Records. John is a bit of a loner and a social misfit at school, and using his "gift" doesn't help much. Meanwhile, there is a lot of dysfunctional behavior between his mother, father, and grandmother. John's father is out of work, and they have been forced to live in grandmother's house. John's mother is an emotional train wreck with unpredictable mood swings. The reader has to interpret events through John's lens, but he doesn't understand half of what's going on. Some gaps are easier to fill in than others. Eventually John's lie detection escalates to a level that leads to family crisis.

M. J. Hyland describes John as very tall for his age, and implies his physical maturation is taking place earlier than normal. But how "abnormal" is he? Some characters were put off by his size; others dismissed it as a minor detail. I also found it difficult to decide whether John was a misfit because he had superior intelligence, or because he was emotionally disturbed. John seems to ignore his height, which would be unusual for a child wanting to fit in at school. And yet late in the novel, he uses his size to gain an advantage in a frightening way. This was the most significant credibility gap in his character, but there were many other minor situations that didn't seem like the behavior of a 10-year-old.

The story of John's unraveling family held my interest, especially because so much was left to conjecture. But I've read a lot of "dysfunctional family novels," and they need to bring something new and fresh for me to really enjoy them. In this case, too much revolved around John's character, and once he had lost credibility my enthusiasm for this novel waned.
 
 Cross-posted from my blog

Matthew's Review - Mother's Milk - 2006 Shortlist

I've reviewed the three previous novels in the Patrick Melrose cycle at my blog.

'What else is there to do but read too much into things? What a poor, thin, dull world we'd live in we didn't. Besides, is it possible? There's always more meaning than we can lay our hands on,' says Patrick Melrose at the end of Mother's Milk, the fourth novel in the series by Edward St Aubyn. This is a particularly revealing quote from Patrick, who has spent the entire novel doing the same overly cruel self-analysis that marked the emergence of a more mature Patrick in the previous novel. In Mother's Milk, Patrick is married and has two children, both of whom he loves but mostly in the sense that he doesn't want to repeat the cycle of his upbringing.

The series of novels is often called a cycle in that each novel seems to wrap around similar themes while still dragging Patrick and his supporting cast through the inexorable march of time. However, the cycle can also be attributed to the generational divide among the cast. While every character has that same exceedingly witty voice, there exists a tension between each generation: a fear of repeating past mistakes, but inevitably making new ones. Eleanor, Patrick's mother, bristles at her posh upbringing and devotes her life to charity, but with mixed results and ultimately, failure at the hands of a New Age charlatan. Patrick bristles at the backlash to the posh upbringing by lavishly becoming a heroin addict and a drunk, wasting piles of money ruthlessly. His son, Robert, is an introvert, inheriting his father's gift for observation, but without the inhumanity that characterizes Patrick. Each member of the supporting cast seems uncomfortable in their social class, with the extreme rich engaging in an exaggerated performance, a hyper-rich pursuance.

Mother's Milk eschews the microscopic scale of the previous novels for a grander structure, in which St Aubyn picks up with the Melrose family every August for four years. In this way, St Aubyn accomplishes the entirety of the previous trilogy but in one novel. In an interview with the Guardian, St Aubyn remarks that this novel stands alone, apart from the trilogy. Not only does this show in the structure, but in the family. Mary, Robert and youngest son Thomas are introduced and sketched out over the course of the novel, but with mixed results. Mary is woefully under-defined, as her only characteristic seems to be a forced return to virginity after the birth of Thomas. She replaces her husband with her newest child, and does not have the skill to articulate exactly why. Thomas is only three at the end of the novel, and in typically St Aubyn fashion, is overly articulate and verbose for a three year old. He isn't really a character but a device for Patrick to resent and love. Robert fares the most out of the non-Patrick characters; he is insular and exceedingly observant about the world, but he matches this with a sense of humour and a sense of humanity. Not only is he able to pick up on social situations, but he is also perceptive of emotions, something his father lacks.

With each August, the situation between Eleanor and her son deteriorates. She bequeaths the familial vacation home in France to the New Age charlatan, and employs Patrick as a barrister to perform the legal requirements. Thus, one of the themes of the novels, Patrick becomes the instrument of his own disinheriting. As above, Patrick struggles against his new middle class position, and the French vacation home represents one of the last vestiges of the Melrose's opulent history, as well as one of Patrick few remaining happy memories of his childhood.

Mother's Milk is not a very good title euphonically speaking, but it does perfectly suit the themes of the novel: that which the mother sacrifices for her child, or lack there of. St Aubyn's maturity as a novelist is apparent in the expansion of scale and scope and the success therein. While the third novel in the trilogy capitalized on the emotional buildup from two other novels, Mother's Milk creates and sustains its own conflict and catharsis. It's devastating when Patrick lies awake frightened that he will fail his sons by dying early, and it's devastating when Robert mentally calculates the amount consumed from a bourbon bottle held by his father. The novel is quite an experience.

Unfortunately, all is not perfect. The opening sequences, which is almost exclusively through the point of view of Robert, is an attempt to portray the development of a baby's mind but with the same verbosity of St Aubyn's other focalized characters. It's somewhat off-putting and without any energy or forward momentum. The novel doesn't become interesting until the next section in which St Aubyn wisely expands his scope to include the rest of the cast.

However, despite this, St Aubyn's prose remains stellar and perceptive. His characters match the same astuteness that his prose has. It's gratifying to read characters who are not completely oblivious to the irony of their own situations. They operate as real people do, ones who can see the unfairness of life but laugh at the futility of observing that unfairness. Characters in a lot of other novels could never be so self-aware without touching on the border of metafiction as in St Aubyn's Mother's Milk. They read into everything because that's what people do.

Laura's Review - In the Country of Men

That visit has remained with me ever since. Whenever I am faced with someone who holds the strings of my fate – an immigration officer, a professor – I can feel the distant reverberations from that day, my inauguration into the dark art of submission. Perhaps this is why I often find a shameful pleasure in submitting to authority. … And this is also why, when I finally think I have gained the pleasure of authority, a sense of self-loathing rises to clasp me by the throat. I have always been able to imagine being unjustifiably hated. (p. 159)

When his father disappears one day in 1979, nine-year-old Suleiman’s life is forever changed. Just a short time before, the same thing happened to his best friend Kareem’s father. Instead of spending long happy summer days playing with neighborhood boys, Suleiman tries to make sense of his world. He acts out his emotions and uncertainty, turning on Kareem instead of offering support.

Under the Qaddafi regime, Libya had become a place where dissent was dangerous. Counter-revolutionaries were rounded up for interrogation; some never returned. Suleiman’s mother Najwa tells him Baba is on a business trip, and consoles herself with “medicine” (alcohol, obtained illegally). She has her own demons, having been forced by her family to marry when she was just 14. To protect Baba from investigators, Najwa and a family friend Moosa burn his books and papers. But Suleiman nearly gets caught in the web when a strange man begins asking him questions about Baba and his associates. In one of the more horrifying scenes Suleiman, Najwa, and Moosa watch a public execution on television. At the end, the TV broadcast returned to images of flowers and nationalistic music. And life went on.

Suleiman grew into a man, but one with emotional scars that would never heal. Hisham Matar writes convincingly, and from direct experience: his own father disappeared many years ago, and to this day Matar doesn’t know what happened to him. When he describes the televised execution’s impact on Suleiman, you know he’s also talking about himself:

Something was absent in the stadium, something that could no longer be relied on. Apart from making me lose trust in the assumption that “good things happen to good people,” the televised execution … would leave another, more lasting impression on me, one that has survived well into my manhood, a kind of quiet panic, as if at any moment the rug could be pulled from beneath my feet. … I had no illusions that I or Baba or Mama were immune from being burned by the madness that overtook the National Basketball Stadium. (p. 198)

This book started slowly and quietly, but the tension steadily grew. I was drawn into the family's story, and felt quite emotional reading about how the events of 1979 affected Suleiman for the rest of his life. This is a very powerful book deserving of its 2006 Booker Prize nomination.




Cross-posted from my blog

Athena K's Review - Mother's Milk

 

Edward St. Aubyn's quirky, scathing little novel touches on a resonant subject, which made for a surprisingly delightful and balanced read.  The tale is narrated by three members of the Melrose family who are as a whole intellectual, self-centered and empty people.  The narration bounces between characters with ease; from precocious 5-year old Robert who opens the book narrating the circumstances of his birth first hand in a bitter voice, to Patrick, the father of the family narrating his dissatisfaction with life resulting in substance abuse and infidelity, to Mary, the mother, and her preoccupation with mothering and spoiling her second son, to the detriment of all other relationships.  They are a witty, sarcastic bunch who offer negative yet entertaining commentary on several subjects, including the wealthy and upper class, adherents of new age theories, and Americans (in general).

Alone, this style would become tiresome and unsustainable.  But the book also offers commentary on the various ways in which families repeat the mistakes of their elders, or, in trying to avoid certain mistakes, swing the pendulum too far to the opposite side.  Patrick is obsessed with his elderly mother's decision to leave her vacation home in the south of France to a New Age institution run by an Irish "shaman" upon her death rather than giving it to him.  Mary is wounded by her mother's disinterest and uninvolvement in her childhood. Who knows what little Robert and Thomas will be attempting to recover from in the wake of their parents' choices.  The power of parenting - and especially mothering - is explored in a wide variety of contexts.

This imperfect novel contains some absolutely delightful gems of description:

"His attention, which usually bounced from one thing to another was still...His mind was glazed over, like a pond drowsily repeating the pattern of the sky."

"They made their way back toward the stone table, trying not to smile too much or look too solemn. Patrick felt himself sliding back under the microscope of his family's attention"

"She went on decanting the poison of her resentment into him for the next two hours."

But the novel ends abruptly, and the witty and sarcastic voices do become a bit tiresome before it does. 

Laura's Review - The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters

Set in 1940s London, The Night Watch revolves around the lives of four people: Kay, Helen, Vivien, and Duncan. The book opens in 1947; each character has experienced the dramatic impact of World War II, living through bombings and coping with loss. Duncan is an ex-con working a menial job. Duncan's sister Vivien is having an affair with a married man. Helen is in a committed but troubled relationship with another character, Julia. Kay is leading a somewhat aimless and lonely existence.

Sarah Waters spends nearly 200 pages building up each of these characters, whose lives appear to be independent from each other. But there is much Waters leaves unsaid. Just as I was wondering where all this was going, Waters employed a very interesting device: she took me backwards in time. Part 2 of The Night Watch is set in 1944, and there the reader learns much more about each character's history. Some of the connections between characters are explained. In part 1, Vivien briefly encounters Kay and gives her something she's had for a long time. It seems like a minor detail. But in part 2, a particularly harrowing sequence reveals the significance of the encounter in part 1. Part 3, set in 1941, portrays the protagonists at the time of the Blitz, explains how Duncan came to spend time in prison, and provides the backdrop for romantic relationships in place during parts 1 and 2.

It's an effective technique. Moving in reverse allows Waters to show only the most essential details of the past. She weaves a rich tapestry of characters and relationships. And she writes about lesbian love in a refreshingly candid way. The erotic scenes are no more or less explicit than fiction about heterosexual relationships. And they are not there to titillate, but to say, "hey, this is what happens, this is normal." I do believe this type of candor is, in some way, advancing societal understanding and acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships.

However, there was one flaw in The Night Watch: the lavatory figured far too prominently in the story. I know that every character in a novel needs to pee now and then. But does the reader really need to be informed? A couple made love and then one person "went to the lavatory." Someone would "need to use the lavatory" before leaving home. Or, a character would be sitting in their quiet house late at night and hear their partner upstairs, washing up and using the lavatory. A lavatory even featured in the aftermath of a bombing, although it was not being used at the time. What was that about? It really drove me crazy and caused me to knock half a star off the rating of an otherwise good book.




My original review can be found here.

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (Jill)

The Night Watch
By Sarah Waters
Completed December 19, 2008

Sarah Waters swept her readers away with a tale of love, war, betrayal and hardship in her historical novel, The Night Watch. Set against a backdrop of bomb-ravaged London during World War II, this novel explored the lives of four young people – Helen, Vivian, Duncan and Kay – plus their lovers, friends and acquaintances – as they coped with their daily lives on the home front.

Waters structured her novel using a backward timeframe, so that as each year unraveled, you learned more about each character and his/her secrets. The first section was from 1947, and admittedly, this was the hardest section for me to get through. The characters were introduced with very little connection to each other, but I got the sense that their secrets and relationships were somehow woven together. As the book progressed, Waters shined a little more light on each character and story, putting each piece of her puzzle carefully together. It was a brilliant story structure – one that only a talented writer like Waters could pull off.

Each character was developed into an unforgettable person – one you worry about, sympathize with and root for. The Night Watch is considered lesbian fiction, which does not make this a book for everyone, but I found the women’s relationships to be compelling and insightful.

This is my first book by Sarah Waters but certainly won’t be my last. Short-listed for both the Booker and Orange Prizes (and understandably so), The Night Watch was a fantastic look at the lives of young people affected by a terrible war – and how they made the best and worst of these times. ( )

The Night Watch - Wendy's Review

'I go to the cinema,' said Kay; 'there's nothing funny about that. Sometimes I sit through the films twice over. Sometimes I go in half-way through, and watch the second half first. I almost prefer them that way - people's pasts, you know, being so much more interesting than their futures.' -From The Night Watch, page 110-

In The Night Watch, Sarah Waters has created tension and mystery by peering backwards into the past - beginning in 1947 and regressing back in time so that the end of the novel is actually the beginning of the story. This structure is at once unsettling and fascinating.

The novel spins around four Londoners and their significant others and explores the impact of war on relationships. The reader is introduced to each character - Kay, Helen, Viv and Viv's brother, Duncan - immediately following WWII in the year 1947. Each character carries secrets and is struggling with events in their history which are undisclosed to the reader. As the novel progresses, Waters carefully unwraps the past, drawing the threads of the characters' lives together to create a stunning expose about sexuality and the tenuous nature of love amid the historical significance of war.

One of the aspects of the novel which touched me was the exploration of the repercussions of war on youth.

How long did they have to go on, letting the war spoil everything? They had been patient, all this time. They'd lived in darkness. They'd lived without salt, without scent. They'd fed themselves little scraps of pleasure, like parings of cheese. Now she became aware of the minutes as they passed: she felt them, suddenly, for what they were, as fragments of her life, her youth, that were rushing away like so many drops of water, never to return. -From The Night Watch, page 357-

Waters' prose - nuanced and full of empathy for her characters - is a bit like reading a narrative poem. Her descriptions set the reader into the novel, revealing the beauty of the human spirit amid the horror of night-time air raids and causalities. The story is a beautifully rendered, character driven look at World War II from 1941 to 1947.

The Night Watch was shortlisted for the Booker and Orange Prizes - and it is easy to see why. This was my first Sarah Waters novel, but it will not be my last.

Highly recommended; rated 4.5/5.

Laura's Review - The Secret River

The Secret River
Kate Grenville
334 pages


Set in Australia in the early 1800s, The Secret River is the story of William Thornhill, a London riverboat driver sent to Australia after being convicted of a crime. He is accompanied by his wife Sal, who acts as his "master" as required by law. During his twelve month sentence he finds work on a riverboat and, after serving time, buys his own boat and becomes an independent businessman running goods on the river Hawkesbury. Like many "emancipists" of that time, he also stakes his claim to a large parcel of land. The only problem is, the native people claimed it years before. The white settlers demonstrate remarkable hubris, assuming they have a right to the land and shoo-ing the startled natives away.

William embraces life as a free man, but Sal longs for home. When he buys a 100-acre parcel, he extracts a promise from Sal to stay for five years. She believes they will then return to London, but William never takes his part of the bargain seriously. Sal notes each passing day by marking a tree with a knife. "The unspoken between them was that she was a prisoner here, marking off the days in her little round of beaten earth, and it was unspoken because she did not want him to feel a jailer. She was, in a manner of speaking, protecting him from herself." (p. 150) The book's title comes from this and other unspoken secrets between the couple. As time passes, more and more goes unspoken: the size of the native camp on their land, the details of atrocities between whites and native people, the prejudiced and often violent behaviors exhibited by their neighbors. But Sal is no fool, and is well aware of the escalating tensions and the danger to her family.

Grenville keeps a low- to medium-grade tension running throughout the novel. Some of the tension comes from the very act of survival in the Australian wilderness, and the stress between William and Sal. But the primary conflict is direclty with the native people. While William demonstrates a growing awareness of the natives as human beings, as it says on the book jacket, "to keep his family safe, he must permit terrifying cruelty to come to innocent people." The book's denouement portrays the Thornhills' lives years after this "terrifying cruelty." It is somewhat disappointing, as it's unclear how he and Sal resolved their differences. But the outcome is probably quite true to that period in history. This is a memorable book, well deserving of its Commonwealth Prize and Booker Shortlist recognition. ( )

My original review can be found here.