BEYOND REDEMPTION

Edward St Aubyn’s harrowing semi-autobiographical novels—adapted into a web series starring Benedict Cumberbatch that’s now showing on Hotstar—weren’t an obvious fit for the small screen. Though the “vicious”, “poisonous”, “caustic” quintet of books skewering the English ruling class have legions of fans, drug addiction and sexual abuse is not the stuff that sells soap, even in the era of shows about meth-dealing high school teachers (with cancer!).

Yes, even now, Patrick Melrose is incendiary, taking streaming TV into new emotional territory. Each episode covers one of St Aubyn’s five Melrose novels. Years pass between them, and each could easily stand alone, featuring the sort of “epiphany” that characterises literary fiction.

In the first, Cumberbatch turns Melrose’s addiction problem (a laughable understatement) into a sort of black slapstick—discomfiting as much because it’s so funny as because it’s so bleak. Then episode two abandons laughs altogether—almost unbearable, it’s like watching Buster Keaton turning pratfalls, then dying of cancer—to delve into how Patrick became such a basket case: his monstrous father raped him for years.

As the series continues, the monstrosity never goes away. Indeed, Melrose continually struggles with whether he will become a monster himself. But his continual undercutting of his suffering with his acerbic wit serves less as a safety valve releasing the emotional pressure than as a lure that draws the viewer into it. Cumberbatch is by turns self-pitying, loathsome, vicious and hilarious. And each trait conspires to make the viewer feel his pain all the more.