DOUBLE BLIND

Edward St Aubyn HARVILL SECKER, RRP $35

Edward St Aubyn is best known for his Patrick Melrose novels and the subsequent TV series featuring Benedict Cumberbatch. This book, which follows the lives of three friends over a year, is quite a departure. The author manages to cover everything from ecology to genetics and neuroscience with a good helping of psychoanalysis thrown in … as well as every blight bothering the modern world. Along the way, the reader can become mesmerised by the intermittent lectures of interior monologue and the author interventions, expounding his theories of the way the brain works, our inability to define, in any meaningful way, human consciousness, and the weak studies on the efficacy of complementary medicine. Yet it retains a plot and characters that move the story along with few bumps in the narrative. It is guaranteed to make you smile and scowl.

BARRY REYNOLDS

VERDICT: Experiment in thinking