At Last

I was not aware of this writer until I heard him interviewed on CBC. His books are thought provoking and meaningful. His writing style captivates without controlling.

The title of AT LAST refers not simply to the fact that it concerns itself with a funeral, Eleanor Melrose's, but that it forms the conclusion to a five-volume sequence of novels concerning Eleanor's son Patrick that began twenty years earlier with NEVER MIND, which started the hero out in the mid 1960s at age five, when he was fatefully raped by his brutal father. Now into middle age when this final novel takes place (on April 5, 2005--the same day as the second marriage of Prince Charles), Patrick must reconcile himself to his mother's masochistic part in their family dynamic, as well as to her giving her sizable fortune away to a New Age foundation; more important, Patrick must recognize that his vision of his mother is not the last word on who she was or what she did and relinquish the narcissism within himself that would claim otherwise. More than anything else, the Melrose novels are both a satire of and a repudiation of narcissism: the characters St. Aubyn most mercilessly mocks in this book are those completely unable to get past their own egotism, whether it be mercenary and snobbish (like Eleanor's sister Nancy, constantly mourning the loss of her own wealth), or the philosophically minded Erasmus Price, who subordinates everyone else's comments to his own theories of cognition and selfhood.Although less indebted to any particular voice than any of the four other works in the series, AT LAST is most like the third, SOME HOPE, in its comic exposure of an elaborate social celebration (although it eschews SOME HOPE's explicit tonal debt to Evelyn Waugh). Answers are "at last" provided for many of the questions that have haunted Patrick's story from after the first volume, such as how Eleanor's family became so wealthy, and how the milquetoast Eleanor ever managed to leave her brutal and bullying husband. But the fuller achievement of the novel is that it provides a chance for Patrick to see around other people, so that they aren't quite so flat as he'd like to imagine. AT LAST forms a nice capstone to the sequence, and now gives Edward St. Aubyn a chance to pursue other stories more fully.

The Melrose cycle ends, leaving Mother's Milk as its high point. St Aubyn lets his much vaunted prose style get away from him a little here, changing voices so often I sometimes had trouble following who was thinking what. And, in general, too much thinking and not enough talking. Although, the dialogue we *do* get includes this gem - "In a sense I can think about her (Patrick's mother) clearly for the first time, away from the vortex of an empathy that was neither compassionate nor salutory, but a kind of understudy to her own horror". Er...what? No-one I know talks (yes, actual dialogue, see page 220) like that, but maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd. I would suggest that St Aubyn has had some difficulty writing convincingly his alter ego, Patrick, at least after he gets into adulthood in books 3 to 5. On the other hand "At Last" also has Patrick's fun children - especially the bright young Thomas, who unfortunately does not bring back his hilarious imaginary friend Alabala - as well as the terrifying Nicholas Pratt, sometime enabler to David Melrose's evils and verbal assassin par excellence. At any rate, as a gateway drug into the author's pharmaceutically enhanced canon, this works - and if it creates more readers for the superb earlier 4 novels ( The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk  - available for an astonishing 3 bucks a book at Amazon's current prices) - it's a trip worth taking. The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk

Okay, reading is what I do. It's my joy, pain, school, friend, church. I'm that kind of addict. But never, ever has a character become such a part of me that I've dreamed about him. Last night Patrick, Robert, and Thomas Melrose all entered my dreams. Patrick is a part of me. His brilliant mind, his pain, his laugh-out-loud wit, his audacious courage in facing who he is and who his parents are (or aren't) have apparently found a home both in my conscious and subconscious mind. God, I just love these books. While reviewers compare St. Aubyn to everyone from Austin to Waugh, I've never read anyone quite like him: funny, excruciatingly painful, philosophical, psychological, satirical, political, romantic, all in beautiful, elegant prose that makes me sigh. I never underline novels, but these books begged to be underlined.No Patrick is no longer a kid, but since we begin to care about him when he's just 5 and we see him grow and regress, learn and unlearn, come within a whisper of dying and then heal, we care for him the way we do with those we've loved over a long time. And we root for them in a deep, real way. So when Patrick decides to leave the lonely bedsit and make that phone call, well I took a long, happy deep breath and wished them all the best.By the way, the reviewers who complain about the boys clearly don't know any precocious children. I find them both believable and damn adorable, and I've known a few small people who could hold their own with both of them.

These novels seem to be St. Aubyn's thinly fictionalized memoir. He is one of the many very gifted Brits who continually startle me with their textured prose. He is or was also one of those wretched young men who almost methodically set out to destroy themselves and their lives with alcohol, drugs, and behavior I would like to attribute to a near-permanent adolescence, although St. Aubyn's childhood, if it is anything like the one described in the book, may be sufficient reason. There is an encouraging arc as the novels progress, and a large degree of healing. He writes so well and describes everything so vividly that I, for one, wished him health and stability almost as though I knew him. Perhaps these novels in depicting the depths of druggy squalor, may not the o everyone's taste.