Some Hope - Edward St Aubyn

Some Hope is the third in St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose series, the successor to Bad News which I reviewed on this blog earlier in the year.

It's a successor only in the temporal sense. Eight years have passed since the death of Patrick's father in Bad News. Patrick is now 30, his fortune depleted, and completely drug-free. He has, it might be said, lost everything that drew us to him in Never Mind and Bad News. Fortunately he has kept his excoriating wit; unfortunately we are not afforded sufficient opportunity to wallow in it. For Some Hope is only tangentially about Patrick Melrose. In truth it is about an ill-judged birthday party at the country house of some ghastly aristocrats, who have invited Patrick along with countless others, including Princess Margaret, who was still among us when the book was published in 1994.


The novel consists of snatches of waspish conversation between the partygoers and examples of just how stuck-up and downright horrible Princess Margaret was in later life. While this is all amusing - and on occasion laugh-out-loud funny - it is not Melrosian. Patrick, hates himself just as much as he hates other people and is therefore entitled to the sharpest and blackest of humour.


I enjoyed the book and happy to recommend it. It is, however, impossible to escape the suspicion that St Aubyn was merely treading water when he conceived it. He can and has done better and I will continue to read him whenever I get the chance.

Bad News - Edward St Aubyn

Very much the flavour of the month, thanks to the Showtime dramatisations (which I hated), St Aubyn has written five autobiographical novels about his alter ego, Patrick Melrose. Bad News is the second. It is also, as it happens, the novel upon which the first episode of the dramatization was based, the only one I managed to sit through to the end.

Turns out I dislike the acting of Benedict Cumberbatch much more than I dislike the writing of Edward St Aubyn. In fact, I like the writing a great deal. St Aubyn is rich, pampered, objectionable in principle - of course he became an author of autobiographical novels, that's what people like him do, just as people slightly less well off than him publish them. Talent, however, is no respecter of wealth or lack thereof. I loved St Aubyn's way with words from the off. I especially enjoyed the scenes in which Patrick is so stoned that he hears voices. I was less fond of the scene in which he dines with a trio of bores; this is because, self-evidently, they are boring.


We have to accept that Bad News is already a historic artefact, a relic of an era now long gone. 1992 (when the book was written) was when heroin chic was ultra-fashionable and those with inherited wealth were the perverted mirror of 'honest' entrepreneurs like Branson and Green. The book is set in 1982 when St Aubyn/Melrose was 22, which makes him a pioneer of excess. Patrick Melrose is reminiscent of the late 7th Marquess of Bristol, except that Melrose is never going to run out of cash. Ah, those were the days!


The trick, of course, is that St Aubyn makes Melrose not only acceptable but actually likeable. We laugh at his jokes, we tag along on his helter-skelter of Class A drugs. We do not want him to come to harm.


Much of this empathy is achieved via the horrible backstory of being raped as a child by his unspeakable father. The bad news of the title, by the way, is that old man Melrose has died in New York and Patrick has to fly in (on Concorde) to collect the cremains. We are told by the internet that this is what in fact happened to young Edward. The older Edward is successful as a novelist because he tells the tale of the ultimate sad little rich boy. He knows whereof he writes. And he really does write beautifully. More of the same for me, then!