Fiction: ‘Parallel Lines' by Edward St. Aubyn

Wall Street Journal

31-05-2025

Edward St. Aubyn's five-book cycle, the Patrick Melrose novels, published between 1992 and 2011 and now widely recognized as a classic of British literature, covers a lot of territory in the chronicle of its magnetically messed-up hero. Childhood trauma, addiction, euthanasia and the concealed cruelties of the English aristocracy count among its darkest preoccupations. Mr. St. Aubyn is equally obsessed with psychoanalysis and ethical philosophy, inheritance and spirituality, and the torment of trying to distill such mysteries into meaningful language. The novels veer breathtakingly from gonzo druggie farce to exquisite manor-house satire to earnest talking-cure confessionals, relying on the diamantine luster of the prose to hold them all together. You should read them, is what I'm saying.
Less obviously, the books are also instances of what the critic Marco Roth has labeled 'neuronovels': fiction interested in the brain's relation to behavior and personality. 'Never Mind' (1992), the first book in the series, turns on the first time that Patrick, at 5 years old, is sexually abused by his sadistic father. During the violation he feels himself 'split in half,' so that part of his consciousness is stuck in the moment of violence and part seems to have escaped his body to seek distraction in anything else. The mental rupture defines his coming of age. In an indelible scene from his drug-addled 20s in 'Bad News' (1992), Patrick has a full-fledged schizophrenic episode when his brain is colonized by a 'bacteria of voices.' The depictions of his fragmentation, and his long, arduous struggle toward unity, are so precise and vivid that they could serve as neuropsychology case studies.
The brain and its role as the seat of consciousness continue as fixations in the fitfully successful novels Mr. St. Aubyn has published outside the Melrose series, the best of which are 'Double Blind' (2021) and its sequel, 'Parallel Lives.' Science is confronted far more technically in these pendant works, whose decentralized cast, spread mostly between Britain and the U.S., allows the omnivorous author to indulge in an exploratory sprawl of ideas. Among the characters established in 'Double Blind' is the billionaire venture capitalist Hunter Sterling, who has begun investing in futuristic biotech innovations such as 'Happy Helmets,' which reproduce in their wearers' brains the neurological states of, for instance, business leaders or religious gurus. Yet that very cerebral plasticity is a source of crisis for Hunter's love interest, Lucy, who in her 30s is diagnosed with a brain tumor and ushered into a life of cancer treatments.