Edward St. Aubyn’s latest novel is, according to the publisher’s blurb, written with the English author’s “trademark wit and inimitable style.” Readers with even a passing acquaintance with that wit and style may find themselves flummoxed while turning the book’s opening pages. For, instead of encountering stately, pristine prose laced with arch commentary, savage humor, and acute observations, we are assailed by a thick torrent of disjoined thoughts and manic impressions. This is definitely not business as usual. Has St. Aubyn repositioned his brand and diversified his talent?
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The reason for the disorientation soon becomes apparent. The book’s first chapter revolves around a young Englishman named Sebastian, who is schizophrenic and a patient in the suicide observation room of a psychiatric hospital. His restless, troubled mind is on full display. He views the countryside through reinforced glass and imagines invisible, bomb-ravaged cities “full of incandescent ghosts.” He is tormented by octopus tentacles, mirrors, and memories of a woman he used to text and call hundreds of times a day. He covers his ears and hums to himself to block out the amplified sound of hungry cows “wrenching roots from the ground.” Those cows need three of their four stomachs “to rip apart the tough fabric of the universe,” Sebastian muses, “to break down the cellulites, or cellophane, or cell mates, there was a word for it, the cell phones that bound everything together.”
After taking us into Sebastian’s head, St. Aubyn veers off and brings in other characters. In doing so, he switches his storytelling mode and assumes his familiar narrative voice. We meet Francis, a botanist, who has made great strides in his field of work. Once part of a rewilding project on a Sussex country estate, he has now joined a nongovernmental organization helping to save the Amazon rainforest. He has a young son with his wife, Olivia, who has swapped London for rural life. Sidelining jealous thoughts about whether Francis might fall for his employer, “sexy, polyamorist philanthropist” Hope, Olivia devotes her energies to making a radio series for the BBC about the six most likely causes of the end of the world. “Artificial intelligence, pandemics, nuclear annihilation, global warming, asteroids, and overpopulation” constitute her dirty half-dozen. She researches each topic, then realizes she is suffering from “extinction fatigue.”
St. Aubyn introduces another couple, Hunter and Lucy. As with Francis and Olivia, each is more interesting when away from their respective partner and interacting with other characters. Lucy, Olivia’s best friend, attempts stoically to soldier on while battling brain cancer. Hunter, on the other hand, has chosen not to fight but to withdraw. After enjoying a steady drug habit and adding to his considerable wealth with a company engaged in “transcranial stimulation,” Hunter has been brought low by being around Lucy. Claiming he has “compassion burnout,” he flees to Italy to seek sanctuary for a few days in a monastery. “The compassion doesn’t just run out,” he tells the kindly Father Guido, “it turns into resentment and sometimes into hatred, as well as speculation about the life I might have had rather than the one I do.”
However, the main focal point of the novel is Sebastian, and the life he has and might have had. Determined to track down his mother, who abandoned him as a child, Sebastian finally reconnects with Karen. But his “Bio Mum” botches their reunion by overwhelming him with the revelation that he is a twin; she then adds insult to injury by presenting him to his long-lost sister, Olivia. Unable to process that he is now “half of a double act,” Sebastian leaves in a rage, his only relief the fact that he has a session the next day with his therapist.
But St. Aubyn has another surprise in store. For that, the therapist, Dr. Martin Carr, happens to be Olivia’s adoptive father. Martin puts two and two together and works out that his vulnerable patient is related to his daughter, but he grapples with his professional ethical dilemma and his duty to Olivia while steering Sebastian through his states of “delusional omnipotence.” At the same time, Sebastian, whose perpetual struggle has been distinguishing between what is real and what is not, strives to grasp and appreciate the unreal reality of a new start in life with a sibling he never knew existed.
Parallel Lines is a sequel of sorts to St. Aubyn’s 2021 novel Double Blind. It has been structured in such a way that it can be read as a stand-alone work, much like each installment of the Patrick Melrose series, the quintet of books for which St. Aubyn is best known. Those scabrously funny autobiographical novels were about a man scarred by childhood trauma who crashes and burns on the rocky road to recovery. They were also lethally sharp satires of the English upper classes — not hapless Wodehousian twits but rather the ruthless, reckless elite.
St. Aubyn’s new books lack these social critiques. More problematically, they don’t feature any characters as dynamic as Melrose. But Parallel Lines, a far better book than its predecessor, still manages to be a compelling and invigorating reading experience. Taking the subject of Olivia’s radio programs as a starting point, St. Aubyn goes on to explore the theme of extinction, whether in terms of mankind’s death wish and inexorable slide toward a global Armageddon or certain characters’ capacities for self-destruction. “The growth in human population seemed to be matched by a surge in the number of Apocalyptic Horsemen,” Olivia reflects at one low ebb. “My funny Guillotine,” sings Sebastian, before recalling the time he tried to use gas and a box of matches to “decontaminate” himself.
The novel’s doom-laden episodes do not preponderate. Characters refuse to be ground down and instead set out to overcome differences and find happiness, or at the very least “the calm during the storm.” St. Aubyn regularly unleashes his caustic wit, at one point to ridicule world leaders (George W. Bush and his father on one side of the pond, David Cameron and Boris Johnson on the other). There are lively scenes involving family conflicts, such as when Olivia asks her mother, Lizzie, to adopt Sebastian. “It’s taken forty-five years to build the family,” Lizzie responds, “and we can’t just tack on a new wing overnight.”
It is sometimes wearying listening in on discussions filled with gnomic pronouncements and clever aperçus. “A paradox is an irony that’s been turned into an equation […] to hold contradictions in balance,” remarks Hunter. (During one conversation, we share the same response as Guido, who “felt he was being bombarded with concepts and moods, impressions and expressions, like insects splattering against a windscreen on a summer drive.”) Far more satisfying are Sebastian’s monologues, with their shrewd wordplay and skewed logic.
St. Aubyn has gone from writing comedies of manners to novels of ideas. While the rigorous intellectual inquiry in Parallel Lines is undoubtedly stimulating, the book’s real strength is its network of emotional bonds, specifically Sebastian’s relationships with his trusted therapist and his lost-and-found sister. “To be continued,” says Olivia at the end. We can look forward to another fine novel which appeals to both hearts and minds.
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.