Paperback of the week
Argue with mother
Edward St Aubyn's Mother's Milk depicts an upper-class
world lacking in niceties
Alex Clark
Sunday January 7, 2007
Mother's Milk
by Edward St Aubyn
Picador £7.99
A novel that chiefly consists of upper-middle class
people being unpleasant to one another may not be your bag, in which case, you
should probably avoid Mother's Milk. For everyone else, remember that one of
the novel's most telling moments comes when Patrick Melrose tells his wife,
Mary, that 'acrimony is all we've got left', and plough on regardless.
In fact, most of Patrick's acrimony bypasses his wife
- though he's fed up enough that motherhood has curtailed both her libido and
her capacity to indulge him - and makes straight for his mother, Eleanor. 'She
was always a lousy mother,' he notes acidly, appraising her decision to leave
the family's grand house in the south of France to a bunch of shamanic
charlatans, 'but I thought she might take a holiday towards the end of her
life, feel that she'd achieved enough by way of betrayal and neglect, and that
it was time to have a break, play with her grandchildren, let us stay in the
house, that sort of thing.' Waiting in the wings to set him off again, should a
bile-free moment occur, is Seamus, keen to expand his 'Transpersonal
Foundation' even if it means Patrick has nowhere to unpack his shoes.
Everyone is pitiable in Mother's Milk - raging
Patrick, enfeebled Eleanor, harassed Mary, even the novel's semi-comprehending
but powerless children - but St Aubyn complicates the issue of whether or not
they engender our sympathy by investing the narrative with powerful and painful
quantities of self-knowledge and gallows humour. Patrick, in particular, spends
most of his time locked in a desperate mediation between his loathing of others
and his loathing of himself, which will come as little surprise to those who
first encountered him in the trilogy Some Hope. What would make him - or any of
the others - happy remains obscure; salvation more than probably doesn't, St
Aubyn suggests, lie in the vapidity and vagueness of Eleanor's new-age
witterings.
Stuck in the material world but revolted by their
materialism, unable to find comfort in kin or kindness, his characters are
stranded in the bleak and unforgiving landscapes of their own heads. Not a nice
place to live - but not bad for readers to drop in on.