(www.smh.com.au/news/book-reviews/mothers-milk/2006/10/06/1159641513193.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1)The
Sunday Morning Herald
Mother's Milk
James Bradley, reviewer
October 6, 2006
This searing novel of family dysfunction deserves
its Booker shortlisting.
Edward St
AubynÕs reputation rests largely on three short novels: Never
Mind, Bad News and Some
Hope. Subsequently
republished in one volume as The Patrick Melrose Trilogy, and more recently as Some
Hope, they follow
the last, gasping stages in the decline of the once-great Melrose family,
reduced by the time of Never Mind to the brutal, poisonous David, his American
heiress wife, Eleanor, and their son, Patrick.
One part
Waugh, one part Easton Ellis, the novels encapsulate all that is essential
about St AubynÕs writing: its cut-glass precision, its psychological acuity and
razor-sharp wit, its chilling vision of the banality and inevitability of human
degradation.
In the
first, the five-year-old Patrick is raped by his father, a sadistic,
self-loathing monster who makes his wife eat food from the floor in front of
guests; in the second, Patrick is a 20-something heroin addict in New York,
stumbling from the world of exclusive clubs and hotels inhabited by the super
rich to the squalid dives of his dealers; in the third, Patrick, his father now
dead, flirts with the possibility of pulling himself back from the edge.
MotherÕs Milk, shortlisted for this yearÕs Man Booker Prize,
is a sequel of sorts to the novels comprising Some Hope. Patrick is nudging 40, his heroin
addiction replaced by an increasing dependence on alcohol, sleeping pills and
anti-depressants, his once lethal sexual attraction faded and blurred by
marriage and the stink of failure. His mother - criminally ineffectual when
Patrick was five - is dying, slowly and painfully, defrauded of what little
remains of her fortune by a conman who has set up a new-age ŌTranspersonal
FoundationĶ on the estate in Provence, which should have passed to Patrick on
his motherÕs death. And there are now three new Melroses - PatrickÕs wife,
Mary, and two young sons, Thomas and Robert.
But
despite its links to the earlier books, MotherÕs Milk is both more and rather less than a
sequel. Other than his family history (or pathology, which in St AubynÕs
fiction is essentially the same thing) the Patrick of MotherÕs Milk bears little relation to the
Patrick of Some Hope. It is unclear how one became the other, or
how the Patrick of Bad News has been absorbed into the psyche of the at
least outwardly respectable barrister of MotherÕs Milk, and there is occasionally
something curiously dissociating about the way the characters in MotherÕs
Milk seem to echo
those in the earlier book without ever quite being them.
In a way,
of course, it doesnÕt matter. MotherÕs Milk works perfectly well on its own. It is seldom
less than brilliant, either in the quality of its prose or its grasp on
character, and fairly crackles with St AubynÕs thrilling wit and oddly
affectless moral fury. Its structure and setting are perfectly adapted to his
talent for capturing the spilling energy of social situations spiralling out of
control.
But in
another way it matters a great deal. St AubynÕs world is one where MarxÕs quip
that history plays out twice, first as tragedy, then as farce is given
painfully human expression. The problem is most acute for Patrick; trapped
within the cage built for him by his abusive father and inadequate mother, he
observes the cycle beginning again with his eldest son, Thomas. But it is
little better for his wife, Mary, whose need to be everything her mother was
not is destroying her, or even for PatrickÕs dying mother, Eleanor, whose
entire life has been a ludicrous travesty of her own motherÕs.
As
psychological determinisms go, St AubynÕs is one of a high order, not least
because the actorsÕ awareness of their fates lends it real pathos. But it is a
determinism, and, just as with Hardy or Zola, or even Mistry, this lends MotherÕs
Milk the hermetic
quality peculiar to novels in which the characters are caught in cycles or
processes that are out of their control.
In a
lesser writer this would almost inevitably be viewed as a failing, but in MotherÕs
Milk, as in Some
Hope, the quality
of St AubynÕs writing transcends these concerns. It is precisely this slightly
hermetic quality that lends MotherÕs Milk its poise and pleasure. His vision of
genealogy as pathology gives the characters their restless energy, imbuing the
writing with a hard-won understanding of the forces of personal history all of
us struggle - and too often fail - to overcome.