A little less conversation
PAUL BAILEY
Double Blind By Edward St Aubyn Harvill Secker £20
Edward St Aubyn’s latest novel is a very curious affair indeed.
Double Blind covers a year in the lives of the kind of people who, unlike the rest of humanity, are never lost for words.
Apart from a young man named Sebastian, who is receiving treatment for chronic schizophrenia, and the kindly Father Guido, a Franciscan priest, the characters tend to talk in neatly phrased paragraphs, which often take on the quality of lectures in miniature.
If the epigeneticist Olivia asks her psychoanalyst father a question, Martin will not have a problem answering it at length. Olivia’s new boyfriend, Francis, is similarly capable of sharing his knowledge of the natural world with anyone who has the time and patience to listen.
As for Hunter Sterling, the American entrepreneur who became a billionaire ‘after selling his legendary hedge fund, Midas, only a few months before the collapse of Lehman Brothers’, and has now founded Digitas, a ‘digital, technological and scientific venture capital firm’ – well, let’s just say that the sound of his own voice seldom fails to afford him pleasure. He stops holding forth only when Saul Prokosh, the wily fellow Princetonian and director of Brainwaves, a division of Digitas, cuts him a line of coke or interrupts his flow with a business proposition.
Olivia’s closest friend is Lucy, who returns to England from New York at the beginning of Double Blind. She has just abandoned her wealthy fiancé, Nathan, and has recently been employed by Hunter Sterling, in whose apartment in St James’s Place she is staying.
On her first night in London, she suffers a severe panic attack and phones Ash, a doctor she has known and trusted for years.
He comes over, examines her and tells her he will call a neurologist and make arrangements for an MRI. He gives her a Zopiclone and she sleeps soundly.
Lucy is lunching with Olivia and Francis when she receives a message from Dr Hammond to say he has the results of the scan. Olivia accompanies her to the hospital, where Lucy learns that she has a brain tumour.
The doctor passes her on to a surgeon, who explains the procedure he will undertake with her permission. She hears him out, though she is numb with shock. She decides, for the immediate future, that she will go through with the engagements she has planned for her boss, who will be arriving shortly.
She does so, and then becomes another fixture in the plot until a scene with an expert in immunotherapy, in the closing pages, shows her in a more impressive light.
In the brilliant novels involving Patrick Melrose and his singularly awful parents, Edward St Aubyn confronts the unspeakable with a lightness of touch that is often reminiscent of Ronald Firbank.
The manner in which he employs a contained skittishness as a means of encompassing both cruelty and despair is masterly. The effortless dialogue is replete with the stops and starts and revelations of everyday communication, and to such an extent that its very truthfulness is the cause of the reader’s astonished laughter.
But that’s literary history. What is unsettling about Double Blind is that it displays only intermittently those qualities of subtle perceptiveness that mark the best of St Aubyn’s earlier works.
The people in Bad News and Some Hope, for example, speak like real men and women. The brainboxes in his latest book are almost robotic when they give voice to their dissertations on ecology, genetics and neuroscience and other subjects with which the Svengali who controls them seems very well informed.
The novel is crammed with information, some of it fascinating but little of it useful to the narrative, which becomes ever more diffuse.
There were times when I had to stop and wonder if I was reading a satire on the state of the technology-driven culture that predominates right now, especially in the scenes set in Hunter Sterling’s lavish properties in the south of France and California.
Among the guests is the vile Cardinal Lagerfeld, a Nazi in crimson and a wheeler-dealer. He wants a share of the profits to be made from the sale of Happy Helmets, purveyors of an item of headgear inspired by the scanning of the saintly Fra Domenico’s cranium before his death after a long life of serenely happy solitude.
It was the obliging Father Guido who allowed Saul Prokosh access to the dying monk, and the kind soul from Assisi is the recipient not only of the cardinal’s abuse but of some leaden humour as well – as when he drinks margaritas under the impression that the tall glasses contain lemonade.
The French home is called Plein Soleil and the American one Apocalypse Now. Hunter Sterling (give that name some thought) certainly likes to live dangerously – if only in the imagination.
Olivia is the adopted daughter of the loquacious Martin Carr and his wife Lizzie. She discovers from her birth mother that she had a twin. Olivia and Sebastian are characters in Twelfth Night. Not long before the end of this cluttered novel, the shrink starts to wonder whether Sebastian is Olivia’s missing brother.
The fact that she wasn’t named Viola is about the only thing here that isn’t explained. At length.
Paul Bailey wrote At the Jerusalem