I am willing to put a lot
of money on the idea that you will likley never read prose as sharp and as
biting as the kind Edward St. Aubyn uses to describe the glamorous yet empty lifestyle
of upper class English elite in his trilogy of novels, collectively entitled
Some Hope. It comes from the depths of the mind and of the black heart of Patrick
Melrose, whose experience within its decadent walls created a person whose life
and personality are as bereft of any kind of meaning as the ones that inspire
his unique and brutal form of hatred. The trilogy centers on three different
events in the life of Patrick at three different stages in his life that have
come to form the quietly intelligent but insanely destructive personality of our
hero. We first meet Patrick’s dad David in the first novel, called Never Mind,
as he cruelly drowns ants as he is watering his garden. This image
characterizes David, the defacto villain of the novel, as an inherently mean
person who is only happy when he can abuse people with the power he has over
them. His image, and ultimately his ghost in the other two books, haunts the
pages and the life of Patrick. We then meet his mom, a tuned out alcoholic who
is also a victim of David’s abuse, especially in a brutal scenes where he makes
her eat off the floor and rapes her on the staircase (which is sadly how
Patrick was conceived). The central scene in this novel is the rape of Patrick
at 5 by his father as a sadistic form of punishment. It is a quiet scene, if you
can call a rape scene that, that instills in Patrick a deep animosity toward
his father and what he stands for, as well as a need for selfishness that
affects everyone Patrick meets in the second novel, Bad News, where he has to
go to New York to pick up his father’s ashes. He is now a drug addict with a
girlfriend he cheats on and a family he could care less about. It chronicles,
in graphic detail, the depths he goes to get high and numb his pain. It is a
dark section, but also the one that is the most humorous. Finally, the third
novel, Some Hope, takes place during a party at a countryside hotel and brings
about the possible redemption of Patrick, eight years after Bad News. He is now
a grown man, free from drugs, yet still holding onto the pain his father caused
him, but with a newfound clarity and able to see the light at the end of his
tunnel, even though he is not there yet. It is quite a draining journey, mixing
the critique of high society Waugh was famous for with the deprave depths
Irvine Welsh’s characters reach in his novels, but one that I am surely glad I
took, because Patrick never loses his sense of humor, even as he reaches the
breaking points of a hard life.
Rating: 5/5
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