At Last, by Edward St Aubyn, Picador, RRP£16.99, 272 pages
The fifth book in Edward St Aubyn’s semi-autobiographical series, At Last, would work well as a stand-alone novel but the reading experience will be richer for those who enjoyed his Man Booker-shortlisted Mother’s Milk (2006). However, it will be most rewarding of all for those who have read the preceding three books, Never Mind (1992), Bad News (1992) and Some Hope (1994), which charted the emotional trajectory of the series’ haunted protagonist, Patrick Melrose, from tormented child to complex adult.
There were many who felt that St Aubyn was unjustly overlooked in 2006; if the Man Booker were given to the best-written novel of the year, it would surely have been awarded to Mother’s Milk rather than Kiran Desai’s forgettable The Inheritance of Loss. As it is, even at the intellectual level of Man Booker judges you hear critical canards about his characters being unlikeable. Another charge often levelled at St Aubyn is class-based: that it’s somehow unseemly to write so elegantly and intimately about the “high-net-worth community”, as a character calls it, specifically the point where American money meets English aristocracy
Full review at FT.com.
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