Edward St Aubyn was recently
interviewed on BBC Culture Show (well perhaps not that recently but
we only recently got around to watching it...).
Never Mind is the first in a sequence
of novels that follow the life of Patrick Melrose, it is also based
on the events of Edward St Aubyn's own life.
This rises very interesting questions
about the relationship between the fiction of Melrose and the reality
of St Aubyn. In the Culture Show interview St Aubyn clearly states
that some passages are direct accounts of the events that he actually
experienced, but much, perhaps most, of the novel Never Mind tells of
events which are happening beyond the experience of the 5 year old
Melrose, and therefore it would seem are imagined by St Aubyn rather
than recalled.
To draw attention to this relationship
is not to make a judgement – that St Aubyn has “made up” most
of the novel does not devalue it, nor does it lessen its status as a
“truthful” account, but it reminds us that too often we operate
with an overly simplistic definition of a “true story”.
Patrick Melrose in fact plays a fairly
small part in the novel – and if it was not for the priming by the
Culture Show that these that the “Patrick Melrose” novels I think
I might well have overlooked him entirely (much as the rest of the
characters in the novel clearly disregard him) and I certainly
wouldn't have come to the conclusion that it was a book “about”
him...
This is a short book, just under 200
pages, and that was a good thing, as it is populated with a cast of
dislikeable individuals, which in interaction with each other seem
only to emphasis one another's failings. There is the sense that if
I had not read it in a single sitting I would not have brought myself
back to it, I would have had little desire to reacquaint myself with
this menagerie of human brokenness.
