Customer Reviews

Some Hope: A Trilogy

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I truly don't understand the reviewers of this book who maunder on about how it was well written, but that they
couldn't really get into it because the characters weren't likable. My God, have they never read "Madame
Bovary"? I read a book for fascination, not necessarily to meet sweet people with darling personalities.

This book is harrowing and wildly funny. It is the single best descrption of drug addiction I've ever read. The
novel is beautifully structured. Yes, the main character (and others, too) are smart-mouthed and funny.
I liked this well enough that I followed up and read "Mother's Milk," which was good, but not as good as this
book. Read this is you are smart. Don't read it if you're looking to hang out with delicate, polite people.

This fascinating but harrowing volume comprises three novellas about Patrick Melrose - as a young boy at his parents' French villa, as a drug-addled young man on the loose in Manhattan, and as sober guest at a British country-house party in honor of Princess Margaret. In economical and blackly humorous prose, St. Aubyn fleshes out a memorable cast of characters. The stand-out is Patrick's monstrous father, who practices snobbism, sarcasm, sadism, and worse crimes. These books are so brief that some characters remain ciphers (particularly Patrick's girlfriends). And the author's decision to abandon the protagonist's mother after the first book is a serious flaw. But the dialogue St. Aubyn puts in Princess Margaret's mouth is worth the price of admission. The situation the author sets up at the end involving the princess, the French ambassador, and a splash of venison sauce crystallizes the book's themes with great humor. On the whole, deeply rewarding if you have a strong stomach.

First third is not very good. Second third is riviting: a portait of an addicted young man on the prowl for drugs in Manhattan; final third is very good: deft, sketches of British aristos, at a country house party, with a very high wire act impersonation of a named Royal, Princess Margaret. I was surprised at how rivited I was by the book's middle passage. The author really makes you feel the dislocation and psychological suffering of his very damaged central character.

SOME HOPE is made up of three novellas, each featuring the experiences of Patrick Melrose during a 24-hour (±) ordeal. In each, St. Aubyn explores Patrick's relationship with David Melrose, his snobby, controlling, and repellent father.

The first novella, NEVER MIND, shows Patrick as a wee boy as he suffers loneliness, neglect, and physical abuse. The second, BAD NEWS, follows Patrick in his early twenties on a hilarious and Herculean drug binge in New York City. The third, SOME HOPE, shows Patrick near thirty and free of addictions. At a party honoring Princess Margaret, he gets a stronger grip on his monstrous father's legacy and the allure of his snobbish world.

The writing throughout these three novellas is absolutely sensational. If a good writer allows a reader to experience the life, aspirations, and psychology of his/her characters, St. Aubyn is a GREAT writer in this book. To a degree, this is due to his breathtaking metaphors and similes, which go beyond deft phrases to actually capture and define a moment or effect. Here are four that I like, two from BAD NEWS and two from SOME HOPE.

o The heroin followed in a soft rain of felt hammers playing up his spine and rumbling into his skull.
o Patrick sprung up the steps of the Key Club with unaccustomed eagerness, his nerves squirming like a bed of maggots whose protective stone has been flicked aside.

o ...a couple of years earlier, he had started to realize what it must be like to be lucid all the time, an unpunctuated stretch of consciousness, a white tunnel, hollow and dim, like a bone with the marrow sucked out.
o The two men fell silent and stared at the throng that struggled... with the same frantic but restricted motion of bacteria multiplying under microscope.

This book is highly recommended. But I quibble on one point: Cabbies traveling from Kennedy don't use the Williamsburg Bridge and The Avenue of the Americas to reach the Pierre. Instead, they take the Triborough Bridge and FDR Drive. Otherwise, fantastic!

This book which is a compilation of three novellas is in equal parts harrowing and hilarious, with each novella describing a single day in the life of Patrick Melrose. My habit of taking notes after finishing a book held me in good stead in this case, since some of the funniest passages, taken out of context were even funnier, and the characture of Princess Margaret in the final third of the book is lough out loud funny ("The Queen was saying only the other day that London property prices are so high that she doesn't know how she'd cope without Buckingham Palace.") Patrick Melrose, unwanted and abused from his very conception, nevertheless manages to survive. The central story, the least funny but the best written of the three, is a harrowing description of addiction.

St. Aubyn is undoubtedly one of the two or three English writers today whose works are worth reading again and again. Much like Alan Hollinghurst, whose latest work, The Line of Beauty, won the Man Booker in 2004, Edward St. Aubyn spent much time earning a living as a deputy editor of the [London] Times Literary Supplement after taking a degree (or two) from Cambridge. St. Aubyn has the capability of literally piling you up with sentences repleat with sardonic, pithy, and astute observations that one tends to forget that the protagnoist, Patrick Melrose, is undergoing a rather unsual upbringing at the 'hands' of his father. Composed of three novellas that chronicle Patrick's entry into twentysomethinghood, the first novella is good; the second is quite riviting; and the third offers a more or less lucid (if not altogehter happy) avenue into adulthood with its various fiscal, personal, and prescriptive requirements. St. Aubyn has a writing style that is smooth, exquisitely colorful, and fluid. It is not very often, in the process of reading a modern author, that one retreats to the Oxford English Dictionary for elucidation and edification of a bon mot unencountered in the past. These novellas are an excellent introduction to his work; On the Edge and A Clue to the Exit are his follow on books which are, unfortuantely, not available in the United States; his latest work, Mother's Milk (2006), takes up again with Patrick Melrose who is now in his later forties or early fifties; has a family and an erasible mother. There is an extensive review of St. Aubyn's work in the Times Literary Supplement of 8 September 2000.

St. Aubyn has created a masterwork. Some of the sentences he writes are so breathtakingly true that I find myself astonished to see my own thoughts on the page. This is a book I can see myself re-reading every year. The characters are riveting. There's not much action but it's very gripping to look into this black portrait of humanity. It's a dark comedy set to paper.

Difficult read, in the best sense of the phrase. Characters drip with egotism. Prose is spare, unforgiving, and surprisingly unjaded at times. Written by a professional. Why write such a thing? Is this what teaches us to live? It teaches us what it us to live. Like looking at the question of evil from a religious perspective, only this seems purely secular. Does it have lasting value? At least a few hours, so far. I think that's enough to recommend very highly.

Some Hope by Edward St. Aubyn is a trilogy of novellas about the cruel and sadistic British aristocrat David Melrose. In some ways, the book is really about son Patrick Melrose who suffers at the hands of both his perverse father and his drug-addicted mother.

The first novella is literally saturated with examples of the evility of David Melrose and the sufferings of his family at his hands. In the second novella, son Patrick trudges through the harrowing New York City scene mingling with all those lowly commoners called Americans. The third novella concerns Patrick's experimenting with various and sundry illegal drugs.

This trilogy of novellas shows how being raised by twisted parents
leads to the children becoming equally twisted adults themselves. This is a most unusual and excellent work of literary art.

The trilogy the title refers to, revolves around Patrick Melrose at three points in his life. The first is at five when he's raped by his sadistic father. The second is in his late twenties as a a drug addict who has come to claim his father's ashes. The final section is a glimpse at Patrick as a recovered addict, navigating life while trying to put the demon of his father to rest. The technical writing is great. Beautiful witty prose, descriptive and vivid characters and smart witty dialogue. Yet I found it increasingly difficult to hang in there when I detested nearly everyone in the pages of this book. Sneering snobs, and drug addicts. Not my idea of an enjoyable read.