The second of the “Patrick Melrose”
novels.
The cast of the first novel are a
dislikeable collection of individuals – but the is a certain
perverse pleasure in observing them being cruel to one another. In
this novel the attention is focused more firmly on Patrick Melrose,
who is really a fringe character in the first, but this means it is
really an encounter with a single dislikeable individual and as such
lacked the dynamic that kept me engaged with the first.
There are the same questions about the
relationship between fiction and reality arise given the declared
autobiographical nature of the story. The child Patrick was absent
from the scenes of much of the action in the first novel and
therefore the author was not a witness to the events, yet it is also
questionable the extent that the drug addict Patrick can be treated
as a reliable witness to the events the author recounts in this time.
But then we can ask if any of us are actually reliable witness to our
own experiences, isn't all autobiography primarily fiction?
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