Double Blind

Edward St Aubyn

Harvill Secker, £18.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

In his five-part series about Patrick Melrose, an upper-class victim of sexual abuse by his father, Edward St Aubyn set a high bar for tragi-comic fiction. Popularised in a TV adaptation starring Benedict Cumberbatch as the sardonic, troubled central character, these books marked St Aubyn out as a latter day heir to Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, by way of William Burroughs.

Double Blind shifts the dial, but remains within touching distance of his old beat. At its core are issues of mental health, impending death, addiction and family life. As if these were not weighty enough, St Aubyn adds a dazzling scientific enquiry, not just into the human psyche and soul, but exploring brain science, ecology, environment and the limits of individual morality.

Its field of interest is huge, and yet it is exhilarating to follow a writer driven by serious questions. Effervescent but at times excessive, his supercharged prose mirrors his characters, who seem unable to quieten their over-active intelligence.

With the Patrick Melrose novels, much was made of the parallels between the central character’s traumatic story and St Aubyn’s own experience. By contrast, whatever connections lie between Double Blind and its author’s life are immaterial. Here, his imagination feels free. Whether it’s the cocaine-high genetics entrepreneur Hunter, or his new employee Lucy, for whom he immediately falls, or Sebastian, struggling with childhood abandonment, St Aubyn introduces individuals exhibiting elevated intellects and fragility.

Lucy’s wealthy friend Olivia has just begun a relationship with Francis, an environmentalist in Sussex, whose main passion, before he met her, was rewilding. While Olivia’s future starts to look rosy, Lucy learns she has a brain tumour, and goes from high-flier to a woman fearful of finding herself in life’s departure lounge.

Olivia, by contrast, is soon pregnant. A biologist, she was an adopted child. Her adoptive parents are psychoanalysts, and when her father takes on a patient suffering symptoms of schizophrenia, he begins to wonder if this is his daughter’s long-lost brother. The connection allows St Aubyn to tease out the concept of nature v nurture, while Lucy’s illness opens the door to a contemplation of the brain, and its role in making us who we are.

There are moments of brilliance, when St Aubyn lets rip razorish observations. Francis reflects that “His particular sensibility continually generated metaphors to remind himself of a natural state that should have come, well, more naturally, but in his case, came with a caravan of similes and arguments.” He could be referring to the author, whose writing is rich in parallels and allusions. Some work well, quite a few do not.

Even when he misfires, however, there is a magnetic quality to the self-consciously slick conversations and giddying, cynical descriptions. Commenting, for instance, on the brevity of the word "God", Francis thinks: “According to Occam’s Razor, the minimalist aesthetic that was supposed to adjudicate over intellectual life for the rest of time, like a fashion editor in a black pencil skirt who simply refuses to retire, decade after decade, despite the screams of protest from an art department dying for a little moment of Baroque excess and a splash of colour, the parsimony of that single syllable should have won the day.”

Among the bons mots, the blinding apercus, and unabashed pretention, a poignant storyline of love, hope and fear, holds the plot together, or just about. For all his brittleness, St Aubyn understands how people tick. He is also funny. Double Blind risks being called too clever for its own good, yet its strengths outweigh its flaws. Amid a plethora of low-key or downbeat fiction, it stands out for sheer energy and gusto. For anyone bored with the ordinary or predictable, this is a literary shot in the arm: not a dose of vaccine, but of rocket fuel.