Edward St Aubyn’s earlier novel, 2021’s Double Blind, was one thing of a problem even for his devotees. Leaving apart the standard gripe that he’s by no means fairly as compelling with out the protect of his authorial alter ego Patrick Melrose, the obsessive nature of the e-book’s inquiry into bioethics, narcosis, psychotherapy, oncology, enterprise capitalism and inheritance made too heady a cocktail to be greater than sipped, just a few pages at a time. I struggled with it till the final scene, a charity bash the place a schizophrenic younger man takes his first terrified steps in employment as a waiter and occurs upon a girl who, unknown to each, is intimately associated to him. Their probability encounter was intensely transferring and tautly suspenseful – you felt a right away longing to know what would befall them.
That longing is now answered in Parallel Strains, which picks up the narrative 5 years later and reintroduces its forged of curiously troubled characters. Francis, a botanist pursuing a rewilding venture on a Sussex nation property, has now joined an NGO in Ecuador making an attempt to save lots of the Amazonian rainforest. He’s additionally elevating a son together with his spouse, Olivia, a author producing a radio sequence on pure disasters and questioning whether or not Francis can resist the amorous lures of his philanthropist boss. Olivia’s finest good friend, Lucy, is within the throes of therapy for a mind tumour, the traumatic reverberations from which have compelled her boyfriend – wild man plutocrat and drug fiend Hunter – to hunt refuge with “compassion burnout” at an Italian monastery, the place he’s hosted by a mild abbot, Guido.
The central determine of the story, its unfortunate star, is Sebastian, dragging himself from beneath the boulder of a latest breakdown and pushed to seek out the “bio mum” who deserted him as a boy. {That a} scary psychotic episode of his dominates the opening pages appears like a dangerous transfer on the writer’s half. The uninitiated reader will maybe surprise what the hell is occurring – which can be partly the purpose. The e-book survives it because of St Aubyn’s potent compound of darkish wit and flinty compassion, significantly notable within the relationship between Sebastian and his therapist Martin. The latter’s kindliness has coaxed his most fragile affected person – an orphan of the storm – in the direction of the attainable shelter of sanity (although the meds assist, too).
The Bob Dylan tune Shelter from the Storm is referenced right here, however it’s arguably one other from the identical album, Easy Twist of Destiny, that has a extra important bearing on occasions. Martin is the adoptive father of Olivia and has belatedly realised that she is actually the long-lost twin of Sebastian: “The trains he had been watching from a excessive hill, as they moved in the direction of one another alongside the identical observe, have been about to crumple into one another, as they have been at all times going to.” Through the wrong-headed meddling of their start mom, this sibling encounter has now come to cross. However is it reconciliation or tragedy that awaits on the finish?
I’ve seldom learn a novel that argues extra cogently for the hard-won breakthroughs of psychoanalysis. Martin and his spouse, Lizzie, are splendidly sane exponents of a observe that continues to be prone to charlatans and a breeding floor for narcissists. One of many novel’s funniest passages is Lizzie’s lengthy riff on the advisability of “a minimal quantity of research” for all aspirant world leaders. If George W Bush, for instance, had gone on the sofa as a substitute of dodging the draft, the second Gulf battle would possibly by no means have occurred. Underneath cautious steering the president may need come to grasp that he was in competitors together with his father, an precise battle hero versus W’s wannabe, and will merely have imagined invading Iraq (the “Mission Achieved” banner was his crowning act of hubris). Contemplating the current incumbent of the White Home, this prescription takes on even higher urgency.
If there’s a flaw in St Aubyn’s dramas of consciousness it’s the tendency of his characters all to assume and speak in the identical register of droll irony. Think about a recreation of mental catch wherein the most effective and most aphoristic impersonation of Gore Vidal wins. Even Sebastian, the harmless overseas, delights his interlocutors together with his manic phrase affiliation and upside-down logic. On the novel’s grand finale – an exhibition of the work of James Turrell, the American artist identified for his investigation of sunshine – our broken hero by accident convinces a gallerist that he’s a critical critic and needs to be commissioned to jot down a list essay.
From suicide statement room to cutting-edge artwork set up, Parallel Strains plots fairly the journey. Can a younger man be saved from the abyss of self-extinction after which face the disconcerting look of a household he by no means knew he had? When brother and sister go to Kenwood Home in north London and take a look at a Rembrandt self-portrait, Olivia observes that the painter’s gaze is “weak however sturdy”, which appears to encapsulate this novel’s philosophical imaginative and prescient. In a lesser author the temptations of sentimentality would get the higher hand, however St Aubyn is clear-sighted and humane on the fundamental requirement of life: “Compassion is simply love within the face of struggling and love doesn’t run out with use – it grows stronger.”
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