Some Hope

Edward St Aubyn’s brilliant trilogy gives hope to us all…

Largely overlooked until the latest instalment in the Patrick Melrose saga, Mother’s Milk, was nominated for the Booker Prize last year, St Aubyn is one of those writers who stuns you at every turn of the page with such devastatingly well written prose that you almost forget that the eponymous, semi-autobiographical anti-hero of Some Hope, originally released as The Patrick Melrose Trilogy, is undoubtedly one of the most disagreeable characters to grace the pages of any novel in recent years.

This story isn’t for the faint hearted – starting with the rape of an eight year old Patrick by his indolent, aristocratic father, Some Hope follows its compelling lead character from the dissolution of childhood innocence through his harrowing years as a drug-addled, upper class delinquent, finally achieving some redemption as he comes to terms with the twin demons of drugs and family that have haunted him throughout his life.

But what sets St Aubyn apart from the world of lurid, kiss-and-tell confessionals is more than just his talent for a wry observation or a witty turn of phrase. It’s his insightful glimpses into the minds of the characters that populate the barren wilderness of the very rich and the very poor alike that have earned him – albeit belatedly – his reputation as one of the most gifted writers of the day. That’s not to say he can’t string a good sentence together. Melrose doesn’t shoot up like some bit-part character in an Irvine Welsh novel, heroin hits him like ‘a soft rain of felt hammers playing up his spine and rumbling into his skull.’

It would be easy to write Some Hope off, as many critics did, as the diarised ramblings of a moneyed wastrel who should have known better. However, with the publication of Mother’s Milk, an astute portrait of the Melroses at middle age, St Aubyn’s reputation has undergone something of a transformation. But it’s the sheer immediacy of his early writing that makes your jaw drop. With traces of urban alienation and adolescent angst reminiscent of more well known classics such as Less than Zero or even The Catcher in the Rye, Some Hope manages to capture accurately not only the tortured mindset of an author who promised to kill himself if he didn’t finish his first novel by the age of twenty eight, but also his ultimate salvation in a rollercoaster journey across two continents and two decades that will leave you, like Melrose, strangely elated by the last page. Cathartic literature at its very best.