Bad News by Edward St Aubyn
In the second of Edward St Aubyn’s Melrose cycle, Patrick goes on a bender. The end.
“Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favourite cushion.”
In this love letter to drugs and drink, twenty-two-year-old Patrick orchestrates the combinations and timings of his various fixes, amplifying or dampening highs according to appetite, circumstance, and opportunity. I delighted in his destruction: the strongest moments are the most technical, the most abject - the open tissue, the gouging needles, the blood and precision and assault. There’s a lovely gallows humour beating beneath it all, binding us to Patrick despite his pitiful bathroom-floor pursuits.
There could be no negotiation between people who thought that cocaine was a vaguely naughty and salacious drug and the intravenous addict who knew that it was an opportunity to experience the arctic landscape of pure terror. (p53)
I’d like to excise Chapter 7 though: that pantomime of disembodied chatter echoing the drowned voices in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood. It’s far more gripping to be in the company of Patrick’s body and wit than awash in the miasma of his hallucinations.
“It was an important skill to be able to swallow a pill without anything to drink. People who needed a drink were intolerable... ”
The bad news of the title is the death of Patrick’s father. Fresh from Never Mind, we know this is good news - if that’s ever completely possible. The second book coasts on the character development of the first, and it’s this compassion for the boy Patrick was that has the reader biting their fingernails here.
