‘Patrick Melrose’ and the Virtues of Sadness
The English novel (by which I, of course, mean novels written by British and Irish novelists because that’s how these kinds of designations work) is one of those things whose death has been consistently heralded almost since the moment of its birth. Pretty much every year for the past decade Will Self gets to publish his single transferable essay on this topic and pretty much every year I will dutifully read it and nod along, often while stroking my chin intelligently, until I finish it and realise that it’s probably all a bit overblown and the same as his last essay. But one genre of the English novel that, I think, has run its course is the saga of the upper (or upper middle) class family who sit in rooms and are sad.
These books are the most stereotypically English of novels, being as they are obsessed with the minutiae of class, the subtleties of the little insults we deliver to one another without being aware of it and the ultimate futility of seeking satisfaction in anything grand. Fundamental to these novels are the questions of what we owe to our families and whether people can transcend their backgrounds, mixed in (in most cases) with a large dose of prurient interest in appalling posh people. Thought of like that, these novels exhibit and elucidate all of the metaphors and stories that opinion-forming British people have told about themselves, explaining the genre’s enduring appeal throughout the 20th century.
Central to these books is a kind of sadness that is hard to pinpoint but which, in a synesthetic way, always makes me think of the colour brown and probably comes from living in a soggy little island of old and mixed up people.
The origins of this genre are hard to trace and no doubt there are English professors across the Anglophone world who will scoff at my genealogy. But I think the originator may well be Henry James, whose stories of provincial Americans making their way in the corrupt but beautiful high society of the Old World offer a clear foregrounding for the themes I’ve sketched.
James, of course, was an American and so necessarily cannot stand entirely within this lineage. (A position that, no doubt, he would have found appropriate.) So perhaps it would be more appropriate to think of the lineage originating with John Galsworthy, in particular his ‘Forsyte Saga’ (1906–1922). The Forsytes, not far removed from yeoman farmers, are keenly aware that they are not quite the thing. Exploring the themes of duty, generational conflict and material versus spiritual prosperity, we clearly see the delineations of a genre that would be taken up by subsequent writers. We should also note the similarities between the Forsytes and the Galsworthys, which are hardly a coincidence and would be copied by later authors.
One theme, however, was not meaningfully available to James or Galsworthy (although James, as an American, did perceive it at an angle) but which came to hang over all subsequent novels in this genre: that of decline. A certain tiredness, an age, an intelligence to perceive that things aren’t quite what they were but a lack of imagination or aptitude to work out how to rectify them. This is both the story of many of our characters and, in a grand way, the British nation in the second half of the 20th century.
It is no surprise then that we approach the genre’s apogee in the period where decline was at its most acute. Well, if not the apogee precisely then perhaps the genre’s grandest, most imperial period. I am thinking of Evelyn Waugh, principally ‘Brideshead Revisited’ (1945) and the ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy (1952–61) but, in a jaundiced way, his earlier satires too, and Anthony Powell’s ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’ (1951–75) cycle. Mervyn Peake’s surrealist ‘Gormenghast’ cycle (1946–59) also falls into this category. Graham Green, particularly his philosophically-inflected novels of the 1940s, arguably does too, although his explicit theological concerns mean that he can never be fully of the genre (not that that ever stopped Waugh, it must be said).
The greatest novel of this period, and arguably the greatest Anglophone novel of the century, is ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ (1974), a novel whose entire plot involves old, sad, upper-class British men sitting in rooms distrusting each other. Most often considered in the context of espionage novels, it also clearly belongs to the genre I’ve been describing. That it appeared in the mid-1970s, traditionally graded as the climax of Britain’s period of postwar decline, is no coincidence. It is a masterful contradiction — the thriller defined by the stillness of its characters.
As the century wore on, the examples recede somewhat but they pop up here and there. Some of Kingsley Amis’s satires could conceivably fall into this group. But they become rarer and the most notable of British novelists as the years go by are conspicuously not working in this genre. Class is an ever-present, of course, but Martin Amis is too grimy, Ian McEwan too gothic and Julian Barnes too bourgeois. Even Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie, profoundly concerned with family sagas, are altogether too surreal to fit into this genre.
It has its second life, I would argue, from the 1990s onwards, possibly as a response to the end of the country’s egalitarian experiment after 1945. In ‘Amsterdam’ (1998), McEwan had three upper class men muse on the mortality of their shared former lover. He was duly rewarded with the Booker Prize and furthered his explorations of these themes in ‘Atonement’ (2001) and ‘On Chesil Beach’ (2007). Notably, both books are period pieces, perhaps a sign that the genre ill-fits 21st century Britain. The latter in particular is, although more bourgeois in its characters than Waugh would allow, a perfect encapsulation of the genre: two people in a hotel unable to express their feelings and becoming calamitously sad as a result.
Outside of McEwan, the other books in this genre produced around this time would include Kazu Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’ (1989), Zadie Smith’s ‘White Teeth’ (2000) and Alan Hollinghurst’s ‘The Line of Beauty’ (2004). Smith, in particular, looked to have revitalised the genre through an infusion of multiculturalism that seemed to speak to the times more closely. It is a genre that looked to be in rude health a decade ago but now seems to be in decline: Ishiguro and Smith have moved on to other themes while Hollinghurst’s and McEwan’s more recent works seem to be of diminishing quality (if not, yet, public notice).
As with many other things, perhaps the greatest example of the genre appears right at the end of things.
Published in five novels between 1992 and 2012, Edward St Aubyn ‘Patrick Melrose’ cycle is one of the best novels of my lifetime, their greatness only matched by their relative lack of public profile, although this has probably changed thanks to the 2018 television series starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
‘Patrick Melrose’ shares many of the important aspects of the genre — a concern with class and the family and to what extent we’re defined by both — but differs from its predecessors in a number of ways. In the first place, when we think of ‘The Forsyte Saga’ or ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,’ we think of sprawling casts and recurring narrative digressions. But St Aubyn entirely does away with that. His focus is on Patrick and his monstrous parents, while almost all other characters are cut down to cyphers.
The first three novels in the cycle — ‘Never Mind’ (1992), ‘At Last’ 1992 and ‘Some Hope’ (1994) — concern Patrick’s childhood sexual abuse at the hands of his father, collapse into heroin addiction and subsequent cold turkey. Produced after a considerable gap, the final two volumes — ‘Mother’s Milk’ (2005) and ‘At Last’ (2012) — follow Patrick as an adult alcoholic with a family. This division also mirrors a shift in perspective, with the first three novels concerning Patrick’s relationship with his father and the later with his mother. Needless to say, he is completely miserable throughout all of them.
David Melrose, Patrick’s father and truly one of modern fiction’s greatest monsters, is first introduced to us drowning ants in his garden and reminiscing about the time he forced his wife (then-girlfriend) to eat food off the floor as part of a sex game. Later on in the day he rapes his son for the first time, seemingly out of boredom. After the event he ponders whether “he had perhaps pushed his disdain for middle-class prudery a little too far. Even at the bar of the Cavalry and Guards Club one couldn’t boast about homosexual, paedophillic incest with any confidence of a favourable reception. Who could he tell that he had raped his five-year-old son? He could not think of a single person who would not prefer to change the subject”. Later that evening he has friends round to dinner where he systematically humiliates them all with his brutal, but witty, put downs.
David dies at the beginning of the second novel, precipitating Patrick’s heroin-fuelled journey to New York to collect his ashes, all the while struggling to put into words the fullest extent of his hatred for his father. By the time we get to ‘Some Hope’, Patrick is going cold turkey while trying to navigate his way through a truly horrifying upper class garden party (including a masterfully awful picture of Princess Margaret that really ought to be shown to anyone who found her character charming in ‘The Crown’).
The screw turns in ‘Mother’s Milk’, by which point Patrick is married with children and the victim of his mother’s more subtle forms of torture. She features relatively little in the opening three volumes and, where she does, it is as one of David’s other victims. Eleanor Melrose, we learn, has failed to protect her son while spending her money on a variety of children’s charities of varying levels of legitimacy. Patrick — who, having squandered his trust fund on heroin, now makes a semblance of a living as a criminal defence barrister — is summarily disinherited in favour of a devotee of New Age mysticism whose status as a conman is clear to everyone from the off. As a final indignity, she asks Patrick to draw up the paperwork necessary to make this happen.
This struggle forms the backdrop of ‘Mother’s Milk’, which eschews the tight settings of the other volumes of the series and is told over the course of four years. The climax comes when, having persuaded Patrick to arrange for her euthenasia at great cost to himself (both financial and personal, as he grapples with his murderous feelings towards her), Eleanor abruptly cancels the whole trip on the day she is due to travel.
In ‘At Last’, the meaning of which is clear, Eleanor has finally died and the events of the book take place over the day of her memorial service. Patrick comments to a friend that “my mother’s death is the best thing to happen to me since… well, since my father’s death.”
Having read the 700 or so pages before this comment, it’s hard not to disagree.
Despite its general contempt for New Age methods and the language of self-help, the cycle shows a level of respect for psychiatry and ‘At Last’ is explicitly about closure. The final realisation is Patrick’s understanding that Eleanor was not only David’s victim but also his partner in a sadomasochistic relationship in which Patrick was just their pawn. In its own way, that counts as a comfort for Patrick.
As many other reviewers have noted, the entire cycle is closely based on St Aubyn’s life, such that, were he an American, they would no doubt find themselves classed as auto-fiction. But, given that, it is strange when all of the characters other than Patrick, David and Eleanor are reduced to mere cyphers. Mary, Patrick’s nurturing and long-suffering wife, exists not so much as a character as a stark counterpoint to Eleanor’s charitable selfishness. Patrick’s best (and only) friend Johnny Hall transforms himself from hopeless drug addict to respected psychoanalyst over the course of the series, in order to better serve as his friend’s sounding board. The nouveau riche are all irredeemably vulgar, the Americans all irredeemably chummy. It would be less of a problem were St Aubyn a better mimic: in my experience, Americans and British children do not speak as they do in these novels.
The books are always totally solipsistic, in a manner that anyone who has suffered from depression will recognise. At some points, however, it might become wearying when everyone speaks in the same kind of Shakespearean soliloquies as the narrator. In one incident, a guest at Eleanor’s wake is asked how he’s doing and proceeds to give a page long speech about that stage in life where one goes to more memorial services than weddings. Nobody talks like that. The answer to that problem, if there is one, is to sit back and enjoy the quality writing.
And, make no mistake, the writing is of the highest quality. Though occasionally trending into a wordiness close to abstraction, St Aubyn’s sentences always contain plenty of witty lines, even of the cruel kind, and delicate metaphors with occasional excursions into what can only be described as lyric poetry. Any writer who effectively manages to be satirical, savage, tender and moving at the same time without us noticing the joins (too much) deserves our respect and attention. If, as it seems, the men-in-rooms-being-sad genre is going to be out of favour for the near-future, I can hardly think of a better bang for it to have gone out on.
