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Misery / Toska by Anton Chekhov (Translation)

Chekhov’s story, Misery (Toska in Russian), is one of my favourites. It has a certain mystical resonance, in spite of its earthy subject matter. I first tried to translate it two years ago, but never got further than the first paragraph. This time I have managed to get to the end. It has previously been translated under the title “Heartache” (by Payne) and “Misery” (by Garnett). After the conclusion I will write a few final comments.

Misery

To whom shall I tell my sorrow?

The day is ending. Large wet snow lazily flutters around the recently-lit streetlamps and lies in a thin layer upon roofs, the backs of horses, on hats and shoulders. The coachman Iona Potapov is completely white… white as a ghost. He has curled himself up as tightly as any living being can and sits where he is without moving a muscle. Even if an entire snowdrift fell upon him… even then he would not think to shake the snow from himself… His little horse is also white and motionless. With the way that she doesn’t move, with the blockiness of her body and her legs straight as sticks, she looks more like a toy horse than any real one. It seems she is lost in thought. If you had been torn from your plough and the usual dull pictures of life and thrust here, into this confusion of monstrous fires, the endless crack of the whip and people constantly running past… if this happened to you, it would be strange not to be left with something to think about.

Iona and his horse have been in their spot for a long time now. They left home before lunch, and so far nobody has had need of them. And now an evening gloom is descending on the whole city. The pale light of the streetlamps becomes brighter and more intense, and the hustle and bustle of the street grows louder.

“Driver, take us to Vyborgskaya” Iona hears. “Driver!”

Iona shudders and sees through eyelashes sticky with snow an officer in a hooded overcoat.

“To Vyborgskaya,” repeats the officer. “Wake up man! Take me to Vyborgskaya!”

To show his agreement Iona gives a tug on the reins. Powdery snow falls from his shoulders and from the horse’s back… The officer sits in the sledge. His driver smacks his lips, extends his neck like a swan, sits up straight and gives his horse a whip, more from habit than any real need. His little horse also extends her neck, bends her stick-legs, and uncertainly moves off from their spot…

“What are you doing, idiot!” As soon as they got going Iona hears shouting from some dark mass, moving forward and back nearby. “Where the devil are you going? Stay in your lane!”

“Can’t you drive? Stick to the right!” The officer complains.

The dark mass attacking him was a coachman with a private carriage. A pedestrian crossing the road has bumped into Iona’s horse and now glares at him and shakes the snow from his sleeve. Iona shifts about uneasily, as if he is sitting on needles, sticks his elbows out to the side and lets his eyes wander, as though not in his right mind. It’s as if he doesn’t understand where he is or what he’s doing.

“What a bunch of scoundrels they all are!” says the witty officer. “Either they try to bump into you or they just throw themselves under your horse. They have it all worked out.”

Iona looks at his passenger and his lips quiver. He seems to want to say something, but he only croaks.

“What?” Asks the officer.

Ion bends his mouth into a smile, tenses his throat and croaks:

“My son, sir, he… my son passed away this week.”

“Hm!… and what did he die of?”

Iona twists his whole torso round to his passenger and says: “Who knows? Probably from fever… Three days he lay in the hospital and then he died… It was God’s will.”

“Out of the way, damn you!” Sounds ring out in the darkness. “You dog, what’s wrong with you? Use your eyes!”

“Come on, come on…” Says the passenger. “Otherwise we won’t make it till tomorrow. Give her another go with the whip!”

The coachman once more extends his neck, straightens himself out and with a certain solid gracefulness waves his whip. Later he looks at his passenger a few times, but the other has already closed his eyes and no longer seems in the mood to listen. Once he has let him out at Vyborgskaya, Iona stops outside an inn, curls into himself again and waits without stirring… Wet snow once more paints him and his horse white. An hour passes, then another…

Along the pavement, loudly clacking their galoshes and teasing each other, come three young men. Two of them are tall and thin; the third is short and stooped.

“Driver, take us to Politseiskii Bridge!” Shouts the hunchback with a rasping voice. “Twenty copecks for the three of us.”

Iona pulls on his reins and smacks his lips. Twenty copecks isn’t fair, but what does he care? What’s the difference between a rouble and ten? For him it’s all the same, so long as he has a passenger… The young people, swearing and shoving at each other, approach the sledge and all three of them immediately climb into the space for seating. Now they start to argue about who will sit and who will have to stand? After a long argument, much capriciousness and reproaches, they decide that the hunchback, as the smallest, is the one who ought to stand.

“Well, let’s get going!” Rasps the hunchback, settling himself just behind Iona and breathing on the back of his neck. “Chop chop! That’s quite a hat, mate! I don’t think you could find a more wretched piece of work anywhere in all Petersburg…”

“Hehe… hehe…” Laughs Iona. “Yes, it is a strange one…”

“Well, whatever it is, come on and get us moving. Are we going to go this slow the whole journey? Come on, or I’ll give you something to help speed you up.”

“My head is killing me…” Says one of the taller men. “When I was at the Dukmasovs’ house yesterday Vasya and I managed four bottles of cognac between us.”

“I just don’t understand why you always lie about this stuff.” Says the other taller man. “You lie like a dog.”

“God be my witness, it’s true…”

“It’s just as true as saying a flea can cough.”

“Hehe!” Says Iona with a smirk. “What good-natured gentlemen you are!”

“Tfu, what do you know?…” says the hunchback indignantly. “Are you going or not, you old thing? Is this really how you drive? Give her a whip! What the hell. Come on!”

Behind his back Iona feels the hunchback turn and the rumbling of his voice. He hears the swearing, sees the people, and little-by-little he starts to feel the loneliness retreat from his heart. The hunchback keeps complaining in the most elaborate manner until at last a fit off coughing comes over him. The two taller men start to talk about some or other Nadezhda Petrovna. Iona looks round to them. He waits for a short pause, then he turns round again and murmurs: “This week my, my son… he passed away!”

“We all die.” Says the hunchback, drying his lips after the last of the coughing has finished. “Well, come on, get to it! God, I’m afraid I really can’t go on like this! When on earth are we going to get there?”

“Why don’t you give him a whack to get him going? Just a small one!”

“Old man, do you hear us? You don’t want me to give you a whack in the neck, do you? No point just waiting around with you, better to leave and do the rest on foot. Do you hear us, you snake? Or do you not give a damn about what we have to say?”

And Iona hears the sound of the blow more than he feels it.

“Hehe…” he laughs. “What cheerful gentlemen… may God grant you health!”

“Eh, driver, are you married?” Asks a tall one.

“Me, sir? Hehe, cheery gentlemen! Nowadays the only wife I have is the earth beneath our feet. Hoho… The grave, I mean!… My son is dead, and yet I live… What a strange thing to happen… Death must have mixed us up. Instead of coming for me, he went for my boy…”

And Iona turns to tell them the story of his son, but just at that moment the hunchback sighs with relief and announces that they – thank God! – have arrived. Iona gets his twenty kopecks, and for a long time he looks after the walkers, and watches as they disappear into a dark entranceway. Once more he is alone, once more he has only silence for company… The great miserythat he had managed to keep down returns and makes his chest fit to burst with its strength. Iona’s eyes run over the crowds scurrying down both sides of the street anxiously, like the eyes of a martyr. Is there not one person among the many thousands who would hear him out? But the crowds run on, caring neither for him nor his misery… His misery is enormous, it flows without limits. If Iona’s chest split open and all his misery spilled out there would be nowhere on earth that wouldn’t be overwhelmed by it. And yet nobody can see it. Somehow it has managed to fit inside such a worthless little shell that even in broad daylight you wouldn’t be able to make it out…

Iona sees a doorman with a paper bag and decides to talk with him.

“What time would you say it is, my good man?” He asks.

“Ten… what are you doing still here? Get a move on!”

Iona drives a few feet away, bends over, and surrenders to his misery…It already seems like nobody wants to speak with him. But in less than five minutes he straightens up, shakes his head, as if he had felt a stinging pain, and pulls on the reins… He can’t take it any longer.

“Let’s go back.” He thinks. “Let’s go back to the yard!”

And his horse, understanding his thought perfectly, begins to trot the way. Half an hour later, and Iona is already sitting by the big and dirty stove. On the stove, on the floor, on the benches, people are snoring. The air was heavy and stuffy…  Iona looks on the sleepers, scratches himself and thinks that it was a mistake to go back so early.

“And I didn’t get enough done to afford any oats…” he thinks. “That’s true misery for you… A man who knows his work… who has eaten well and fed his horse… such a man will be at ease forevermore…”

In one of the corners a young coachman pushes himself up, yawns sleepily, then reaches for a bucket of water.

“After a drink?” Iona asks.

“Looks like it, doesn’t it!”

“Well, here’s to your health, then. Now, as for me, my son has died… have you heard? Just this week in the hospital… what a story!”

Iona watches to see what effect his words have. But the younger coachman has already covered his head and gone back to sleep. The old man sighs and scratches himself… Just like the young man wanted to drink, he himself wants to talk. Soon it will be a whole seek since his son died, and in all that time he hasn’t spoken with anybody about it… He needs to speak about it seriously, with purpose… He needs to say everything: about how his son got ill, and how he suffered, what he said before he died, and how he died… He needs to describe how the funeral went and his trip to the hospital to pick up the dead man’s clothes. His daughter Anisa is still alive, back in his home village… He needs to say something about her too… The only way to speak about all this would take time. His listener should sigh, and gasp, and wail… It would be best of all to talk with the women. They may be stupid, but they always listen attentively and cry at the right moments.

“Let’s go and check on the horse.” Thinks Iona. “You’ll always have a chance to get some sleep later… Probably you’ll sleep enough to get your fill…”

He gets dressed and goes into the stables where his horse is. He thinks about oats and hay and the weather… Alone, he doesn’t dare think of his son… He could speak with someone about him, but to think about him or even just imagine his face was unbearably painful for him without company…

“Having a nibble?” Iona asks his horse, seeing her shining eyes. “Well, keep at it… If we didn’t earn enough for oats, I suppose there’s always hay for the two of us… Yes… I’m already too old for driving… It’s my son who should be driving, not me… He was a real coachman – you could tell… if only he had lived…”

Iona stands in silence for a while before continuing: “That’s the way it is, old girl. Kuzma Ionich is no more… He should have lived a long life, but he was taken before his time… How can I explain it? Let’s say you have a foal, and you’re its mother… and let’s say this foal is supposed to have a long life… wouldn’t you be sorry?

The horse continues to nibble. She listens and breathes onto the hands of her owner…

And Iona gives himself over to his misery and tells her the whole story.

Closing Remarks

Who has not felt the particular loneliness of trying to speak only to find that nobody is willing to listen? Not all of us have lost a child, and I certainly haven’t, but still that feeling that the world has turned its back against us is one that I feel from time to time. And in those moments of misery, the path back to joy can be so strange that we’d never have considered it otherwise. Talking to a horse may be just the thing we need.

It’s worth noting that the Russian title, Toska, is one of those words which are regularly touted as untranslatable. Nabokov, indeed, rhapsodises about it. And it’s true that the word is in a way untranslatable, because not all of its meanings correspond to one specific English word. There’s often a hint of wistful boredom about it, of being stuck at home and not quite knowing what to do. But that’s certainly not the case here, where the sense of melancholy is overwhelmed by the pain of loss. I felt my title was adequate. So, it seems, did Constance Garnett.

I enjoyed translating this. If it has any major problems, do let me know in the comments. Although I’d be more interested to here if the story resonates with you, so why not comment about that too?

Emperor of Novels – John Williams’ Augustus

John Williams’ (Butcher’s Crossing, Stoner) final completed novel, Augustus, is quite simply the best book I have read all year. At school, an English teacher whose opinion I value highly once said that we know the best books because as soon as we finish them we want to start again. We have gained so much from them, yet we know that so much more lies within, deeper down. What separates these books from your standard ever-interpretable and unfathomably-deep Literary Classics is that these books seem to speak to us. They leave us a feeling of company – it is as if your soul is touched by another’s. If I didn’t have other books to read and exams to think about, I would read Augustus again right now. And then again, and again. It is simply that good. What follows is simply an explanation as to why that is.

Gaius Octavius, later Caesar Augustus, was the first Roman Emperor and is a man widely considered one of the greatest leaders of all time. In Williams’ novel we follow Octavius, as he is usually called here, from his days as a youth, to his battles against his fellow Roman, Marcus Antonius, to his years of undivided power, when on all sides he faced political enemies who were determined to succeed him. Williams does not focus on the battles or on the violence – though both are here. Instead, Augustus’s struggle is to lead Rome and fulfil his duty. More than once is Rome named his daughter, but as the novel progresses it becomes increasingly clear that he feels he is failing her. Forced into violence, time and again, by the necessities of fate, Augustus retains control over Rome, but he watches his friends die, and becomes increasingly alone.

“It is too dark” – The Kaleidoscopic Form of Augustus

The first time I opened Augustus I closed it again immediately. The first thing I saw was a letter. What could be more boring than a novel of letters? I imagined ridiculous, unrealistic, epistolary novels from the 18th century and gave a shudder. Yet I had the wrong idea entirely. Augustus is closer to those questions we sometimes find on history exams where we are asked to compare and contrast sources. We see an event through many different angles – that of a historian, an eyewitness memoir, perhaps a newspaper report or even a cartoon – and we must evaluate these sources against each other and try to determine what really happened and why. We must check for biases, for concealed information. In short, we must work for our knowledge.

A sculpture of the head of Augustus
A sculpture of the young Augustus. As with the novel itself it tells us something of the man that once was. But filling in the gaps requires our imagination. Aiwok, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Augustus works by the same principle. Williams weaves together truth and fiction, letters and diaries and proclamations and histories from all sorts of eminent Romans, to tell the story of Augustus’ life. As with Conrad’s Nostromo, we never seem to see Augustus himself, except through the eyes of others. We as readers are always having to think about what we read, to work from glimpses, as if through coloured glass, to guess at what the real man is like. Often, all we get is an image:

“I understand that he wants the letter. I hand it to him, and he turns away from us. The ring of officers breaks for him, and he walks down the hill. For a long time we watch him, a slight boyish figure walking on the deserted field, moving slowly, this way and that, as if trying to discover a way to go.”

The effect of this is incomparable. Augustus appears so vitally human precisely because we know him through confusion and uncertainty, just as we know every human being. No narrator will tell us who he is, just as no human being will tell us who they are either, except through their words and their actions. To create him as I read was one of the most exciting things about reading Augustus.

The Roman Touch – Philosophy, Morals and Nobility

I studied Latin at school. While I can’t pretend to have read Cicero, I did stumble through some Seneca and Livy. But anyone who has studied Latin will have a feel for the way that the Romans wrote. That poise, that composure and nobility of style runs through the entirety of Augustus. Not once did I have the impression it was not a Roman’s writing before my eyes. The Roman way of writing in some sense reflects their philosophical outlook. The Romans had something of a disdain for philosophy, compared to their illustrious Greek forbears. Roman philosophy is focused on the practical, the here-and-now questions of ethics much more than anything else. The most famous Roman thinkers, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, were both Stoics. Nobody in Augustus claims to be a Stoic, but all of the characters, whatever their actions, are motivated by high ideals – honour, duty, and patriotism.

It was perhaps a better time. Even Livia, Augustus’ wife, who is determined to secure the succession of her son Tiberius, is far more an antagonist than a villain. Like Cicero, another of Augustus’ opponents, she is a character whose values and hopes go against his. Both of them find value in the older Roman Republic and its ideas of family honour. In part, the tragedy of Augustus is that good people are politically divided because of incompatible values. It is noble – and reasonable – of Livia to write Tiberius such things as “You have a duty to yourself, to your country, to your name”. And there is a more than a hint of heroism in phrases like “Our futures are more important than our selves.” But what she wants necessitates the limiting of Augustus’ power, just as what he wants demands the limiting of her own.

Williams depicts all of his characters with force. They are real people, with their own motivations. Williams, I believe, is speaking when Maecenas writes to Livy against being a moralist. I shall quote it because it gives an idea of the moral tone of the novel:

“it seems to me that the moralist is the most useless and contemptible of creatures. He is useless in that he would expend his energies upon making judgments rather than upon gaining knowledge, for the reason that judgment is easy and knowledge is difficult. He is contemptible in that his judgments reflect a vision of himself which in his ignorance and pride he would impose upon the world. I implore you, do not become a moralist; you will destroy your art and your mind.”

Just as we need to piece together Augustus’ character from scraps and choice remarks, so too must we piece together judgements for ourselves, instead of relying on the author to tell us what to think. And as a result, it forces us to be active participants in the novel, making our own meaning out of what’s there.

Power and Necessity

No character here is good or evil, least of all Augustus himself. When you rule an empire you are forced, constantly, to act to secure your power against those who would wrest it from you. When those who went against Julius Caesar are finally punished by Marcus Antonius and Augustus, Cicero’s head is brought and placed at the rostrum in the Forum where once he had spoken so eloquently. The son of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra is executed also, though he is only seventeen. Even Augustus’ own daughter, Julia, is forced repeatedly into unhappy marriages by her father to secure his political dominance, as are his own friends. All the time, we are faced with the question that Julia asks Augustus as she enters her final marriage:

“”Has it been worth it? Your authority, this Rome that you have saved, this Rome that you have built? Has it been worth all that you have had to do?”

My father looked at me for a long time, and then he looked away. “I must believe that it has,” he said. “We both must believe that it has”.”

One of the novel’s perceptive observers writes that “Octavius Caesar is Rome; and that, perhaps, is the tragedy of his life”. His destiny is Rome, is power, and he does not grow corrupted by that power as so many others do. But in his fulfilment of his destiny, he loses the only things that ever gave him joy – his daughter, and his friends. Forced to choose between his private and his public duties, Augustus always chooses the latter, and eventually he is left all alone. When his old friends have died, he is surrounded by only those who lust after power. That is to say, people he cannot trust. And yet his body will not fail him, and he continues to grow old, all alone.

Julia

The story that, according to my copy’s introduction, was the seed out of which Augustus grew, was not Augustus’ own but that of his daughter, Julia. Augustus had no son, but his daughter was given an education in art and philosophy that at the time was reserved for sons alone. Julia is an extraordinary character, a woman whose existence was scrubbed away by history as best it could. Augustus loved her – and this love is truly touching – but perhaps the greatest tragedy of the novel is how Julia, in spite of her knowledge and intelligence, ends up herself becoming a piece on the chessboard of her father’s Empire. And unlike him, who managed to survive to the end, Augustus was forced to let her be captured.

In the end, Augustus leaves us with a sense of limitations. Julia at one point says to her father the wonderful line “The power you have… cannot legislate against the passions of the human heart”. And it is true. Augustus cannot control the hearts of his people, whether friend or foe. In the same way, try as he might to bring peace to the Romans instead he is forced, time and time again, to spill their blood. “There is no wall that can be built to protect the human heart from its own weakness”. People fail repeatedly here. After all, we cannot know another’s heart, and perhaps we cannot even know our own. Augustus is a man determined to do good, and he does, but at great cost – to his health, to his friends and family. It is up to us as readers can say whether it was worth it.

Conclusion

I could write more but I will not. Augustus is perhaps the closest thing to a perfect novel I have ever read. I love it with a passion I struggle to put into words. Its nobility, its formal ingenuity, its gripping plot with tragedy and farce and all the rest together, its characters with their forceful existence, all this I love. John Williams’ absolutely stunning prose I love too. Augustus is a novel for now and forevermore. In its questions of power and necessity, in its praise of the value of friendship and love, in its exploration of the obscurity of knowledge and the unfathomability of the human heart, it is incomparable. If ever a post on this blog has proved for you a reason to go out and buy a book, let it be this one. It will blow you away.

For more on these themes, see my review of William’s earlier novel, Butcher’s Crossing, and my comments on Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo.

Have you read Augustus, and what did you think of it if you have? What do you make of the final section of the work, where Augustus himself speaks? Does it undermine what comes before, or strengthen it?

The Patrick Melrose Novels – Edward St Aubyn

It was my birthday on Friday, and what better way to celebrate than to think about another book, or rather series of books, that deals with growing up as one of their main themes. The Patrick Melrose Novels were recommended to me by a novelist I know, and it was an excellent choice. The series takes the life of its hero, Patrick, from the age of five right up to middle age. Born in the early 1960s, Patrick’s life runs in many ways parallel to those of my parents and their generation. And not just in terms of age, but also in terms of class and wealth. Patrick is, like my father was, a man living in the shadow of inherited wealth. Yet like the rest of his generation, he witnesses a changing of the times, where what we can get from our parents ends up not being quite enough.

What I liked about the series is the way that it speaks to my own experience of the world. I have no wish to defend the upper classes of England, but what these novels show is a seedier side to their lives that moves beyond the traditional targets of vapid cocktail parties, selfishness, and wasted potential. Patrick Melrose is sexually abused by his father and given precious little kindness by his mother or other people around him. In his twenties he is a drug addict, and as an adult he is constantly at war with alcohol. The failures of these people are not just failures to care about those beneath them, but failures to care even about each other. At the heart of Edward St Aubyn’s novels is an engagement with the upper classes on their own terms, with a kind of cautious sympathy.

In looking at these people’s failures, he’s willing to ask where did we go wrong?

Never Mind – Patrick Melrose #1

At the centre of the Patrick Melrose series lie questions of identity. Who are we, and how did we become them? Never Mind, the first novel in the series, takes us to France, where Patrick Melrose is just a boy of five. With the exception of Mother’s Milk, all of these novels take place over a single day, with memories used to fill in details. On the day of Never Mind there is a dinner party at the Melrose residence, at which two couples will be attending besides the organisers. The novel focuses on Patrick’s father, David Melrose, who is a larger-than-life figure. He wears “an inattentive expression, until he spotted another person’s vulnerability”. Though at one point one of the characters describes him as heroic, the word “villainous” is much more apt. David is a tyrant and a sadist. His enjoyment of the world comes through his controlling it.

We can look for the reasons why he is like this in Never Mind, and there are plenty. He doesn’t work and is bored. He hasn’t earned his money, which he has through marriage to his wife, and perhaps is bitter. His own father was an equal tyrant, crushing David’s dreams of becoming a professional musician. All of these are potential explanations, but in the end, we’re left feeling unsatisfied by them. David subjects Patrick to sexual abuse, and Patrick himself is the product of his mother’s rape – these are not things which even a difficult childhood can excuse. The challenge, reading through the series, for us as for Patrick, is to come to terms with the past, to understand David without forgiving him, or at least to accept him.

The character of David is best described by Nicholas Pratt, one of the other guests of the party: “Such people, though perhaps destructive and cruel towards those who are closest to them, often possess a vitality that makes other people seem dull by comparison.” This too, that David is “good fun”, is no excuse. But within the novel it explains his magnetism. David derides morality, he derides everything, and that grants him a kind of power over the world. Nicholas Pratt is a more traditional representative of his class, a man who does nothing and is at this stage on his fourth of fifth wife. An embodiment of the “boys-will-be-boys” attitude, he sees very little wrong in David. After all, a little cruelty goes a long way in hardening kids up. I remember my own character-building showers at prep school, where there was no hot water.

Alongside Nicholas there is his girlfriend, Bridget, who is there only for his sexual gratification and is herself in her late teens. Though she’s from a good family, she’s a fine gradation of class lower than the other characters, and they spend most of the novel ignoring her or mocking her. Then there is a philosopher, Victor Eisen, who seems to enjoy “ironically” the company, and his own girlfriend, Anne, who had worked for the New York Times.

Of these characters it is Anne who stands out. She alone takes an interest in the young Patrick. In a key image at the end of the novel she comes and sits with him on the stairs while the rest of the adults are having their party. She does not stay for long, and we are left with a sense of what could have been. The Patrick Melrose series is in a way the consequence of missing out on kindness when it is needed. Patrick’s own mother stays inside, continuing to eat. When he needed it, there was nobody there for him.

Anne is also unique because among all of the women of the story, she alone appears to work. Part of the prevailing attitude of the characters in these novels is an unpleasant sexism, which leaves the women trapped at home and unable to develop anything except alcoholism. Anne alone has managed to make something of herself, and it means that she is able to see their world from the outside, and understand just how rotten it is.

Bad News – Patrick Melrose #2

The second novel of the series sees Patrick Melrose aged 22 and addicted to heroin and everything else he can put inside him. He is in New York, collecting his father’s ashes. I did not like Bad News that much. Patrick is a mess and so, in a way, is the novel. I wasn’t a huge fan of the American setting. Though we have a few British characters, including Anne and George Watford (a chum of David’s), in general Patrick’s associates are fellow sufferers of addiction. The whole novel is rather unpleasant to read as a result. Edward St Aubyn himself had a heroin addiction, and I do not doubt the veracity of his descriptions. But still, it brings me no pleasure to read about the intricacies of needlework. Unlike Never Mind, which was funny and sad equally, Bad News is rather too sad to be funny, most of the time.

The addiction is significant, of course. I struggle with addiction myself, though thankfully not to heroin, just as my father and his father struggled with addiction. Addiction is often a way of avoiding something not fully worked out. It is a way of forgetting, even when you don’t want to: “His past seemed to turn to water in his cupped hands and to slip irretrievably through his nervous fingers.” St Aubyn writes well about addiction, it’s just not a subject that he can make particularly funny. And with Patrick’s refusal to think seriously about stopping, and his general early-adult angst and assholery, the novel as a whole was rather frustrating.

Some Hope – Patrick Melrose #3

Some Hope is a much better book, and is perhaps my favourite among the five. Patrick is thirty now, and clean. The central event of the book is a dinner with Princess Margaret at the home of Bridget (now married to George Watford’s son) and subsequent drinks evening. This lets St Aubyn let loose with the full force of his satire, and the novel is really rather funny.

“He moved in a world in which the word ‘charity’, like a beautiful woman shadowed by her jealous husband, was invariably qualified by the words ‘lunch’, ‘committee’, or ‘ball’. ‘Compassion’ nobody had any time for, whereas ‘leniency’ made frequent appearances in the form of complaints about short prison sentences.”

Here the focus is the selfishness, the insularity, the stupidity, of certain members of the British ruling class. Patrick Melrose is now old enough to look with a certain degree of ambivalence on his own people. At the party he meets Anne again, and she apologises for not staying with him on the stairs when he was a child. There is also a moment where Belinda, Bridget’s own daughter, ends up waiting on the stairs and struggling herself, only to have Patrick come and keep her company. Some Hope is a novel where we see development, rather than decline, as we did in Bad News. At one point a girl admits to Patrick that she’s been sleeping with his best friend, hoping to make him jealous. But instead of trying to win her back, Patrick says he’d rather stay friends with his own friend. Suddenly we’re growing up.

Mother’s Milk – Patrick Melrose #4

Mother’s Milk puts us back into decline. Patrick is in his early forties, with two children, Robert and Thomas, an alcohol problem, and a wife, Mary. Patrick has finally got a job as a barrister, though he doesn’t have any money. The novel takes us to Lacoste, where the family home featured in Never Mind is located. Patrick’s mother, Eleanor, is still alive, but she is in a nursing home, having suffered several strokes. Unfortunately for Patrick, Eleanor enjoys trying to make the world a better place, and she has given up the family home for most of the year to be run by a religious foundation seeking out-of-body experiences. Patrick would rather like the house for himself, since it is all that he has to remember his childhood by and is worth not a little money. And so, the novel is in some way a succession crisis between Patrick and the leader of the spiritualists, Seamus.

Patrick’s children and his failed marriage provide some amusement, but I struggled to enjoy the scenes of alcoholism, since I saw a lot of my own father in Patrick at those times. But all of that is to St Aubyn’s credit – he knows his subject matter really well. And unlike in Bad News, he does not present a purely negative, depressing, world. He gives a sense of hope, of progress:

‘Do you want a drink?’ asked Patrick.

‘Oh, no. I don’t drink,’ said Nancy. ‘Didn’t you know? I watched it destroy Daddy’s life. But do help yourself if you want one.’

Patrick imagined one of his children saying, ‘I watched it destroy Daddy’s life.’ He noticed that he was leaning forward in his chair.

‘I might help myself by not having one,’ he said, sinking back and closing his eyes.

At Last – Patrick Melrose #5

At Last is the end – Eleanor has finally kicked the bucket. If in Some Hope Patrick begins to come to terms with his father’s life, in At Last it is his mother whose life he comes to terms with. In spite of her constant charitable endeavours, Eleanor never managed to care for her own son. Not only that, she knew that David was raping him and stood by without intervening, from her own cowardice, or whatever. Early on in Never Mind Nicholas asks: “Is every woman who chooses to live with a difficult man a victim?” And that is the question we have to answer. Patrick is now not drinking, but there is still some final coming-to-terms-with-everything that he has to do. I’m glad that the series ends on a high note, with a novel that is just as funny as its predecessors, while also tying things together.

General Remarks

It is difficult to talk about a series of books in a short blog post, even though the series fits into a single paperback. Some things in The Patrick Melrose Novels are worth emphasising, just in passing. St Aubyn has a fantastic ear for a certain style of speech, one that you occasionally still hear among grandmothers and grandfathers in country houses and castles all over England. Not only that, he knows how to write a great sentence. Most enjoyable of all, he knows how to write a funny sentence. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as much while reading a book as I have here. Yet these are also clever books. At their heart is a serious engagement with serious questions about identity, about money and class, and about families .

I do not think that alone these books would be quite so effective as they are bundled together, though. Their focus on a single day makes development difficult unless you read the books one-after-another. And without development, without its possibility, these novels are simply about Patrick Melrose – an asshole who has perhaps deserves our sympathy, but most of the time not necessarily anything more.

Conclusion

I am now twenty-three years old. One foot in the grave, as I have jokingly remarked to a couple of friends. But a good age to read The Patrick Melrose Novels at. The questions which I ask myself, as a member of the British upper (middle) class, as the son and heir to both a glorious tradition and a difficult and sad one, are reflected here with no small urgency. My own generation is the generation of Patrick’s children. We are another step on from his own. The inherited wealth is drying up, the immorality is becoming harder to stomach, and coasting by on connections is a little harder than it once was. But the problems the series identifies, and some of the solutions, remain just as relevant as the monstrous characters who populate its pages, many of whom it seems I know in real life too.

In the end, I can be grateful for what little progress has been made. And I can be grateful that St Aubyn has so wonderfully written of his own slice of the world and its age. One day I hope I will manage to do the same.