At Last by Edward St Aubyn (Picador)
Edward St Aubyn’s previous novel, Mother’s Milk, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2006 and many thought it should have won instead of Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss. (The same thought occurs with last year’s winner, mysteriously preferred to the brilliant The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell.)
This novel, At Last, is a sequel to St Aubyn’s previous four novels on the Melrose family, but stands perfectly well on its own. Eleanor, whom readers of this saga will remember as an abused wife and extremely inadequate parent, has, at last, died. The question on which the story hangs — and it takes place in its entirety at the funeral and wake somewhere in London — is whether and how this is going to change her son Patrick’s life.
St Aubyn creates a stylish and hilariously observed group portrait of the friends and family, spanning a few generations and several world views. Patrick is a recovering alcoholic, somewhat loosened from the ties of obligation and convention, especially on this day of his mother’s funeral, ‘a crisis strong enough to shake his defences”.
St Aubyn uses the order of service, thoughtfully and perhaps provocatively put together by Patrick’s ex-wife, to have a lot of fun, but tellingly so, with the funeral party. Where better to review family life and modes of child-raising.
The late Eleanor was the spoiled, rich daughter of an American factory owner, but has in recent years passed on her wealth to a religious group, effectively sidelining Patrick. When the first music to be played is Gershwin’s I’ve Got Plenty of Nuttin’ from Porgy and Bess, we get the full Catherine wheel of responses.
Next up is a reading of Yeats’s The Lake Isle of Innisfree, which also strikes a different note in every mind there.
This is a novel about consciousness: under all the fizz and wit, the malice and anger, St Aubyn shows us many ways of looking at life, skilfully drawing together familiar approaches that manifest in various of the funeral party.
New-age religion, psychotherapy, psychiatry, academic philosophy and the completely unreflective modus vivendi of a previous generation are all there. It is indeed a great day for our protagonist, as he begins to move out of the shadow of shocking abuse and past the need for consolation.
In the final scenes we see his uncle, Nicholas, deliver a vitriolically funny diatribe against all forms of psychiatry and therapy. But St Aubyn does not allow him to get away with it.
This is a brilliantly serious book, hugely entertaining and no sooner had I finished it than I thought I should read it again as its wisdom is offered so elegantly and amusingly that one reads on in haste to see what happens to Patrick, missing some of the deeper points along the way.