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‘You mean they’re poor?’ he said.

‘No, they’re rich and aristocratic but not as sympathetic and stout-hearted as the Crawleys.’

One can’t just summarize Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels in a half-minute conversation over a holiday dinner. What I tried to tell my friend then was that the familial premise of the novels is similar to that of the TV series—the marriage of the ultra-wealthy American to the highborn English. But the comparison with the beloved English soap stops there. The characters and events in the books are so infuriatingly unpleasant, there were times I wanted to wrench some people off the page and throttle them to death with their tongues. That’s how effective St Aubyn’s style is. And the conversations are not the only parts that induce hostility and grief in the reader. There are paedophilia, drug addiction, adultery, disinheritance, alcoholism, euthanasia, and marital rape as well, and other things for which “self-destructive” is a mild euphemism, according to Francine Prose.

Given all this unhappiness, what drives one to continue and read on? Apart from the curiosity as to whether redemption is a word the author is familiar with, it’s the author’s prose (and we want redemption, hopelessly—justice, deliverance from evil, meaning in an absurd world, blah blah). Elegance in St Aubyn’s sentences is an understatement. At times, his turns of phrase are so beautiful you might think he loves his own vocabulary, but these elegant sentences usually come from mean mouths or are used in the service of limning nasty characters.

‘The dead are dead,’ [David] went on, ‘and the truth is that one forgets about people when they stop coming to dinner. There are exceptions, of course—namely, the people one forgets during dinner.’

Nicholas struck Anne as more pathetic than he had before. He was just one of those Englishmen who was always saying silly things to sound less pompous, and pompous things to sound less silly. They turned into self-parodies without going to the trouble of acquiring a self first.

‘Really clever people are just thinking aloud,’ [Robert’s] mother had told him, ‘Julia is thinking about what she sounds like.’

It’s as if St Aubyn really overheard the exchanges, for instance, at a party where social dragonflies are guests.

‘And who are you?’ [Princess Margaret] asked Johnny in the most gracious possible manner.

‘Johnny Hall,’ said Johnny, extending a hand.

The republican omission of ma’am, and the thrusting and unacceptable invitation to a handshake, were enough to convince the Princess that Johnny was a man of no importance.

‘It must be funny having the same name as so many other people,’ she speculated. ‘I suppose there are hundreds of John Halls up and down the country.’

‘It teaches one to look for distinction elsewhere and not to rely on an accident of birth,’ said Johnny casually.

‘That’s where people go wrong,’ said the Princess, compressing her lips, ‘there is no accident in birth.’

She swept on before Johnny had a chance to reply.

The humor in the novels is always described as dark, fierce, mordant, biting. St Aubyn has made misery so entertaining that one finds it hard to put aside the books, despite all the cruelty. I could not finish the books without turning from time to time to something light-hearted, good-humored—anything that isn’t maddening (I finally pried open the books I had hoarded: The Ponder Heart, Lost in the Funhouse, and Tell My Horse—see what St Aubyn can make you do).

The five books share identity as the nuclear motif.

Never Mind

Patrick Melrose is five years old. Family friends—Nicholas, Bridget, Victor, Anne—are gathering for dinner in his parents’ Provence manse. His father, David, a non-practicing doctor, and his father’s buddy Nicholas are the principal pricks in the story. Patrick’s mother, Eleanor, on the other hand, is a cowering wife who should have just married liquor instead of the bastard who made her eat figs on all fours on the lawn. Well she would marry liquor and pills later on to escape the maltreatment of her husband, who married her for her money.

As they await their guests, Patrick is raped by his father as “punishment” for an offense whose nature remains a mystery. The passages depicting the rape made me wonder about the nature of suffering and deflection.

In the rape scene, Patrick projects himself into a gecko by the window and scurries on far away where ‘nobody would ever find him again’. A similar incident happens in a short story by Elizabeth Hand called Cleopatra Brimstone. Jane, the protagonist, also gets raped and divides into three parts—one a child kneeling and praying (‘not intently but automatically, trying to get through the strings of words as quickly as possible’), a second part submitting ‘blindly and silently’ to her attacker, and yet another hovering above the other two. When threats to our life, property, or freedom become real, how true is it that we manage not by automatically thinking of that self-defense Judo we signed up for, but by thinking of the future, and then employing the techniques in self-protection? In moments of danger, how much are we like the narrator in Tori Amos’s Me and a Gun, in which the assaulted thinks of having to survive because she hasn’t seen Barbados?

During the dinner, Patrick sits on the stairs waiting for his mother Eleanor to console him. But neither the day nor his mother will ever improve. Anne, a family friend, assures Patrick that she will get Eleanor for him, but David prevents either women from ‘mollycoddling’ the child.

What St Aubyn does is anger the reader. There is no one to root for (Why we feel compelled to unnecessarily sympathize/identify with characters in art is beyond me—damn you, Aristotle and your Poetics). It’s not that most of the people are cruel, but that those you wish you can root for give you no reason to side with them. Not even Patrick.

Definitely not David, who cannot smile but only show his teeth. One minute he plays dance-march tunes for his son on the piano, and the next he plays on his son’s trust. David promises not to hurt Patrick in a game, but then dangles him by the ear so he can learn never ‘to let other people make important decisions for you.’ He is the kind of father who believes all he has to offer his son is a training in detachment. To him, children are ‘weak and ignorant miniature adults who should be given every incentive to correct their weakness and their ignorance.’ Childhood for him is only a romantic myth. He also believes, with no hint of irony at all, that ‘what redeemed life from complete horror was the almost unlimited number of things to be nasty about.’

Not Eleanor, who has many other things to escape from, like a past of severance from caring (her own mother married twice and cared little for her children) that will repeat itself in her relationship with her son. In one scene Eleanor turns her back on the son who needs her while she signs a check for a children’s foundation half a world away. Whenever she is forced to witness David’s venom dripping on a victim, she feels trapped and her pusillanimity gives way, rendering her ‘torn between a desire to save the victim, whose feelings she adopted as her own, and an equally strong desire not to be accused of spoiling a game…. She would never know what to say because whatever she said would be wrong.’

As for Patrick, we want him to be different. We want him to sunder links with his father’s harshness and his mother’s discomfited attempts at whole-souled affection. We want him to grow up loving and kind, to be the redemption in the midst of all this ugliness. Yet he lies awake pondering the events of the day—his father abusing him, his mother coming too late to comfort him, ‘that woman’ (Anne) lying to him—and resolves to one day ‘play football with the heads of his enemies.’ Yes, we want him to get even, but we want him to establish an identity contrary to that of the people around him.

Identity: a question the philosopher Victor chews over for his next book, a question to which Eleanor answers, ‘If anything is in the mind, it’s who you are.’ Bridget asks whether Eleanor is a real victim and Nicholas responds, ‘Is every woman who chooses to live with a difficult man a victim?’ Identity is what Patrick begins to struggle with in Never Mind. When he grows up, will he be another David for whom malice is a game and who finds it ‘boring… to interfere with the exercise of unkindness’? Or will he be another Eleanor who has cemented the path to hell with good intent?