Edward St Aubyn: Parallel Lines, review

 I've always enjoyed and admired Edward St Aubyn's novels: unfortunately, his new one, Parallel Lines, doesn't quite hit the mark. Here is my review for the Telegraph.

 

Future Classics for Spear's

Spear's asked me to recommend some books that might become classics in the future. Read my recs here.

Books of the Year, Day Five: Fiction

 Hello there, and welcome to the thrilling final installment of my books of the year - it's time for fiction! Hurrah! A good year, all in all, Booker mishaps aside, I'd say. It was also a good year for novels by my contemporaries - there was Ivo Stourton's slick The Book Lover's Tale; Anna Stothard's warm and vivid The Pink Hotel, and Jonathan Lee's inventive and accomplished Who is Mr Satoshi?, not to mention Leo Benedictus' post-modern The Afterparty.

1. At Last by Edward St Aubyn

Beware the teeny martini

The latest (and possibly final) book in St Aubyn's acidic Patrick Melrose series, this elegantly skewers the super-rich, and shows a deeply troubled man moving towards peace. There's a fabulous cast of grotesques: Nancy, who, though richer than Croesus, lies and steals and constantly bemoans her fate; Nicholas, a flamboyant and viperish socialite; and the mad drunk Fleur. Patrick seems almost sane by comparison. There are some brilliantly witty vignettes, too, including one about a Grand Duke who drank 20 martinis every day before lunch, which, I have decided, will be my New Year's Resolution. Cheers!

2. The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips

King Arthur: Real?

There are layers upon layers at work in this dazzling novel; it centres around a 'lost' Shakespeare play about King Arthur (itself based on Holinshead), which the author's father may or may not have forged whilst in prison. The book takes the form of an introduction to this play (which you must read first, and you will appreciate the beauty of Phillips' - I mean Shakespeare's - efforts), in which Phillips attempts to tell the story of his life and the events surrounding the play. The reader never finds out whether, within the context of the book, the play is real or not - it's totally fascinating.

3 The London Train by Tessa Hadley

What a novel should be - well-observed, beautifully written, surprising, funny and moving, this diptych shows two marriages in disrepair. Hadley's prose is filled with light; her eyes are keen, and her heart is clearly warm and open. 

4. My Former Heart by Cressida Connolly

A Parrot. Possibly psychotic.

Connolly's debut novel, about the loves and lives of three generations of women. Lilting, luminous prose and a deep understanding of human nature combine to make a polished gem. And there's a delightfully insane parrot called Birdle, as well as some lesbians, if you like that sort of thing.

5. Gods without Men by Hari Kunzru

A very involving tale whose themes and plots bounce around like echoes in a cave, involving the consequences of an autistic boy going missing in the desert. His parents are hounded; their lives interconnect with many other tales of strange disappearances, aliens and angels. Kunzru is a superbly strong writer, and this book won't disappoint.

6. The Champion by Tim Binding

This funny and highly acute satire of middle English life was somewhat overlooked this year; I highly recommend its tale of a Kent boy done good who wreaks havoc on his home town, to the detriment of its professional classes, it's full of insight and wit.

7. Ragnarok by A S Byatt

A numinous and powerful retelling of the myths of Asgard and the ends of the gods, it also works as part memoir and part ecological warning. More of a between novels stopgap, it's still worth reading to watch a master of prose at work.

8. By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham

A married middle aged man falls in love with a beautiful young man; Cunningham perceptively and feelingly dissects the fallout of despair.

9. A Kind Man by Susan Hill

Taut and tense, this tale of the miraculous seeping into the everyday brings with it wisdom and strength. 

10. Ransom by David Malouf and The Lost Books of the Odyssey by Zachary Mason

These both came out last year but they are marvellous: Malouf retells the last book of the Iliad, delving into the concept of ransom - Priam himself was ransomed as a boy, and he gained his name from that - it's a beautiful, eerie, poetical work. Mason's is dreamlike - he relates, in kaleidoscope fashion, different versions of the Odyssey; in which the latter's identity is subsumed; where Ariadne becomes Calypso; where Achilles is a robot. It's great fun.

11. The Hunter by Julia Leigh

Leigh's Disquiet  was a brittle, sharp, poised thing, like an arrow; this is her first novel, based around a man's search for the last Tasmanian tiger. It's just as fluid and elegant as her second, and I can't wait for her next.

So a Happy New Book Year to you all, and I look forward to seeing you in 2012. Now, another martini? 

The Booker Longlist: A Travesty - A D Miller instead of Edward St Aubyn? Madness

Hadley: elegant

I know a lot has been said about this already, but this year's Booker Prize Longlist is mostly entirely mad. It is making my blood boil to the extent that you could probably power an entire city off me. The point about a prize for literary fiction, one would have thought, is that it had literary fiction on its longlist - and by that I mean serious, well-written and thoughtful fiction that doesn't think about whether it will sell in Japan. Crime and thrillers have their own prizes - surely the raison d'être of the Booker is to give space to serious fiction that might not otherwise gain any press at all? I can't talk about the books I haven't read, but I know that I have read at least two novels this year that beat A D Miller's appalling Snowdrops into a cocked hat. Snowdrops, with its clunky prose and guessable plot, embarrassing stereotypes and cringeworthy similes, doesn't deserve to be on this list at all. What about Tessa Hadley's elegant and beautiful The London Train? Or Tim Binding's overlooked The Champion? Or, more potently, Edward St Aubyn's sterling At Last?

A list that has something as inherently bad as Snowdrops on it is not a list that I can take seriously. Perhaps it's time for the Man Booker to rethink its position. Why have thriller writers like Stella Rimington as judges (whose own last novel was reviewed rather, well, feebly). For publicity points? Why have Chris Mullin, whose only literary effort to date has been some rather amiable diaries? No Pepys he. This isn't a proper list - it's like the weird woman in the supermarket taking tins off a shelf at random.

We'll have to wait and see what the shortlist looks like: if Miller's on it, I'm leaving the country if that's what passes for decent fiction these days.

• Read my review of Tessa Hadley
• And my review of Tim Binding
• And of St Aubyn
• And A D Miller.

THE LONG LIST Julian Barnes The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape - Random House)
Sebastian Barry On Canaan's Side (Faber)
Carol Birch Jamrach's Menagerie (Canongate Books)
Patrick deWitt The Sisters Brothers (Granta)
Esi Edugyan Half Blood Blues (Serpent's Tail)
Yvvette Edwards A Cupboard Full of Coats (Oneworld)
Alan Hollinghurst The Stranger's Child (Picador - Pan Macmillan)
Stephen Kelman Pigeon English (Bloomsbury)
Patrick McGuinness The Last Hundred Days (Seren Books)
A.D. Miller Snowdrops (Atlantic)
Alison Pick Far to Go (Headline Review)
Jane Rogers The Testament of Jessie Lamb (Sandstone Press)
D.J. Taylor Derby Day (Chatto & Windus - Random House)

Fame At Last!

Just a quick post: I was walking down Holland Park Avenue, and I saw a display in the window of Daunts. Edward St Aubyn's new novel, At Last, was piled up in the window. And printed on a card below it was an excerpt from my Telegraph review.... Anonymously, of course... Still it gave me a real thrill of secret pleasure to see it there. Somehow, it was much more satisfying than being quoted on the paperback of a book.

A Dance to the Music of Time: Edward St Aubyn's final Patrick Melrose novel, At Last

Edward St Aubyn: My writing hero

Edward St Aubyn has been one of my favourite contemporary writers for years: there are very few people who can construct sentences as well as he can. He has a classically pure prose style at which I marvel (and envy). Five or so years ago, I reviewed his last novel, Mother's Milk, for The Tablet (unavailable online); it was one of those novels that ought to have won the Booker, and it was a great shame that it didn't. I've reviewed At Last for the Telegraph HERE. It's the final chapter - although, as St Aubyn said in an interview with David Sexton, he hopes he hasn't unemployed himself in so doing - in the Patrick Melrose sequence. One could compare it to Powell's Dance to the Music of Time, with recurring characters and sharp social commentary. They're beautifully constructed, savage and witty.

Used Up by Dion Boucicault

A great deal of Christmas cheer was to be had last night at a performance of Dion Boucicault's 'Used Up', at Edward Barker's house in Notting Hill, in aid of the Notting Hill Churches Homeless Concern. Boucicault's London Assurance is a staple of the repertoire; Used Up probably hasn't been performed in a while. Director Matthew Sturgis stumbled upon it in the Lord Chamberlain's Archives. It concerns a gentleman called Sir Charles Coldstream (ably played by Sturgis), who is tired of life. He's been all around Europe, loved hundreds of women, but 'there's nothing in it.' His friends bet him to marry the first woman who comes along; she turns out to be a marginally dodgy bigamist called Lady Clutterbuck. Also in the mix are a bankrupted blacksmith, two carousing aristos (Sir Adonis Leech and the Hon Tom Saville), a farmer called Wurzel and an innocent maid. When Coldstream and Ironbrace the blacksmith fight (erroneously) over Clutterbuck, it causes them both to fake their own deaths in fear of having murdered the other. Yes, it's a marvellously complicated farce, involving wills, ghosts (real or not), hidden chambers and wit. Ultimately it is an assurance of life - Coldstream comes to realise that life is about, basically, having something to do - but it's nothing, he finishes, 'without the approbation of friends'. The cast included William Sieghart, Rupert Smith, Andrew Barrow and Emma Hope; the audience never stopped roaring with laughter. It was indeed marvellous to see even the smallest children thoroughly enjoying themselves (including one little boy who helpfully pointed out where Ironbrace was hiding). In the audience were novelist Edward St Aubyn and satirist Craig Brown, amongst others; Nicky Haslam turned up to the party afterwards looking like a chic cowboy.

Here is some information about Boucicault (pronounced Boo-si-co) from the program:

'Dion Boucicault was, like many great English playwrights, an Irishman ... The author of over two hundred plays, Boucicault said 'I can spin out these rough-and-tumble dramas as a hen lays eggs. It's a degrading occupation, but more money has been made out of guano than out of poetry.'

So here's to guano, and the making of it; and also a Merry Christmas, as this shall be the penultimate post of this extraordinary year. Next up will be my Books of the Year - which may or may not take the form of a sonnet....