Memories like shrapnel: the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn
This is the second in a series of reviews by balqis.
Bad News
Patrick Melrose is twenty-two. His father is dead. He flies to New York to collect the ashes. There his life corkscrews into an event horizon of fragmented identities effected by drugs and alcohol.
Here St Aubyn joins Thomas de Quincey, Aldous Huxley, William S. Burroughs, et al, in delineating the heady, disintegrating but exhilarating upshots of drugs in language so lucid one is tempted to try them. I do not mean that literature encourages one to take up vice and drugs—quite the opposite. Why imperil your health when you have these authors using the power of words to give you the experience, however vicariously?
This needle fever had a psychological life of its own. What better way to be at once the fucker and the fucked, the subject and the object, the scientist and the experiment, trying to set the spirit free by enslaving the body?
Patrick uses drugs, booze, sex when he cannot think his way out of his problem— which is always, because the problem is the way he thinks. His addiction reaches an insane apogee where his consciousness shatters into different personalities. This sequence is funny and frightening at the same time and St Aubyn remarkably never loses the limpidity of his style.
Patrick admits that all solutions are temporary,
… even death, and nothing gave him more faith in the existence of an afterlife than the inexorable sarcasm of Fate. No doubt suicide would turn out to be the violent preface to yet another span of nauseating consciousness, of diminishing spirals and tightening nooses, and memories like shrapnel tearing all day long through his flesh.
He venerates the trinity composed of ‘the Drugs; the Cash; and the Holy Ghost of Credit.’ He wishes to have spent more money during his stay in New York, for he believes that squandering his undeserved fortune, emaciating himself and finally eroding his substance are ways of committing ‘a symbolic suicide while he still dithered about the real one.’ Patrick has this need to feel intensely. He asks,’Do you think the measure of a perversion is its need to be repeated, its inability to be satisfied?’
He felt his sadness and exhaustion fuse with the dissolving and sentimental embrace of the bourbon. It was a moment of catastrophic charm. How could he ever hope to give up drugs? They filled him with such intense emotion. The sense of power they gave him was, admittedly, rather subjective…but then again, life was so subjective.
Patrick also visits Marianne Banks, a potential lover, and her family. Their conversation turns to parents’ inability to express their love, which Marianne says she knows nothing about. The Bankses are a happy family, and Patrick, bitter and disgusted, thinks, ‘What do these people do all day, write scripts for The Brady Bunch? He hated happy families with their mutual encouragement, and their demonstrative affection, and the impression they gave of valuing each other more than other people.’
While reading Never Mind, one asks: Will Patrick ever seek revenge by exposing his father’s sins? Or at least imagine doing it? And if he actually does, is he prepared to face the vulnerability and shame that will result from this act?
In Bad News, he tells no one. When asked by Marianne’s father, Eddy, to consider seeing David as very disturbed and to suppose he ‘just didn’t know how to express [his] love’, Patrick wisely answers that the cause of cruelty merely ‘becomes a theoretical curiosity’ when cruelty’s effect is destructive enough. ‘There are some very nasty people in the world and it is a pity if one of them is your father….Cruelty is the opposite of love, not just some inarticulate version of it.’
He also visits Anne, who regrets not being able to get his mother for him when she said she would (in Never Mind). I thought he might have begrudged her for that but perhaps he has forgiven her or maybe he just let it pass. Or maybe he is past caring and all he needs at Anne’s is another bathroom where he can secretly sniff his Black Beauty. Secretly, when everybody has seen him grow to be a ‘surly and malicious adolescent, and was now a drug-addled twenty-two-year-old.’
Before the torturous fragmentation of his consciousness, Patrick maintains a non-combative conversation with his supplier Pierre (who has spent eight years thinking he was an egg), who pronounces that Patrick has to leave his parents and ‘all that shit’ behind and ‘invent [himself] again to become an individual’. Patrick doesn’t argue but proposes that people ‘think they are individuals because they use the word “I” so often’. Then his ego dissolves in a druggy haze. We do not know where the real Patrick is among those demons. Perhaps because Patrick is all those demons. Luckily, he survives the black hole and emerges from it alive, swinging and cussing.
On his way to the airport, he sees a bitter-faced, seedy-looking man with a severed wrist and he thinks, ‘Heavy smoker. Hater of the world. Mon semblable.’ Although he can identify with the vice and bitterness and disappointment of the man, he decides that there are important differences, like his money, his social status, his youth, his chance at finding his own voice after all the other drug-induced voices have subsided. A chance at finding and possessing his own identity worlds away from his father’s or his mother’s.
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