The I of the Needle

“Bad News” is the second of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels.  Like the first in the series, it’s relatively short and focuses on the events of a single day.  The main character, Patrick Melrose, is now in his early twenties and travels to NYC to collect the remains of his recently deceased abusive and cruel father.  By now Patrick is hopelessly addicted to drugs and is barely functioning in society.  Only his wealth spares him from complete devastation.

As usual, St Aubyn is a master at portraying the cynical self-absorbed well-to-do Englishman. 

For example:

“Kay told him about her own dying parents.  ‘You have to start looking after them badly before you’ve got over the shock of how badly they looked after you,” she said.

Or:

“How was Debbie?  How the fuck should he know?  It was hard enough to rescue himself from the avalanche of his own feelings, without allowing the gloomy St Bernard of his attention to wander into other fields.”

But there is a cynical desperation here which is very striking.  There truly is no escape for Patrick:

“No doubt suicide would turn out to be the violent preface to yet another span of nauseating consciousness, of diminishing spirals and tightening nooses, and memories like shrapnel tearing all day long through his flesh.  Who could guess what exquisite torments lay ahead in the holiday camps of eternity?  It almost made one grateful to be alive.”

Even sex isn’t a refuge from his alienation and self-loathing:

“He must have her.  He must have her, or someone else.  He needed contact, skin to skin, muscle to muscle.  Above all, he needed the oblivious moment of penetration when, for a second, he could stop thinking about himself.  Unless, as too often happened, the appearance of intimacy unleashed a further disembodiment and a deeper privacy.  Never mind that.  If sex sentenced him to an exile which, on top of the usual melancholy, contained the additional irritation of another person’s dumb reproach, the conquest was bound to be exhilarating.  Or was it?  Who was left to him?  Beautiful women were always with someone, unless you happened to catch them in the split second between inconsolable loss and consolation, or in the taxi that was taking them from their principal lover to one of the secondary ones.  And if you had a beautiful woman, they always kept you waiting, kept you doubting, because it was the only time they could be sure that you were thinking about them.”

For me the most revealing aspect of the book is St Aubyn’s depiction of the power of substance abuse.  Start with this description of the effect of cocaine combined with other drugs:

“Patrick sprang 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, exposing them to the assault of the open sky.”

And then these passages:

“How could he ever hope to give up drugs?  They filled him with such intense emotion.  The sense of power they gave him was, admittedly, rather subjective (ruling the world from under the bedcovers, until the milkman arrived and you thought he was a platoon of stormtroopers come to steal your drugs and splatter your brains across the wall), but then again, life was so subjective.”

“He checked the pills again (lower right pocket) and then the envelope (inside left) and then the credit cards (outer left).  This nervous action, which he sometimes performed every few minutes, was like a man crossing himself before an altar – the Drugs; the Cash; and the Holy Ghost of Credit.”

“What was sex next to this compassionate violence?  Only this violence could break open a world constrained by the hidden cameras of conscience and vanity.”

Patrick is a prisoner of his past.  His desperate struggle to stay at least one step ahead of his trauma is very telling without being the least bit contrived.  Welcome to the inside of the mind of a drug addict.  It ain’t pretty.  St Aubyn doesn’t judge, and he depicts without mercy.  Nobody in this book is the least bit likeable.  Not even a little.  St Aubyn shows us the underbelly of human nature, and you’ll wince more than once.  You’ll probably even look away now and then.  Such is the power and credibility of the writing.  It’s also very funny at times, and though we don’t admire Patrick, we do empathize.

The overall effect is somehow therapeutic.  We all have our struggles, and we can all feel some kinship with Patrick’s predicament.  In the end Patrick is only human.  Even though he fails to make any real progress, his very survival from hour to hour is a kind of triumph.  Compared to that, whatever you or I might accomplish seems downright remarkable.