Only the best will do: Patrick Melrose on page and screen
2018; Elsevier BV; Volume: 5; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1016/s2215-0366(18)30344-4
ISSN2215-0374
Autores Tópico(s)Literature Analysis and Criticism
Resumo“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men”Frederick Douglass Start with the Showtime TV series. Five parts, lasting about 5 hours. Then proceed, should the material grip you, to the five novels, now conveniently packaged into one 857-page volume (2015). But, for your own sake, take time with the novels, don't read all of them in 3 weeks, like I did for this review. Take 3 years, or longer, for your enjoyment, and to spread out the dose of your exposure to the suffering, and insufferable, characters you will encounter. That said, Patrick Melrose is a five-novel triumph by Edward St Aubyn. It is taken deeply from his life, but as fiction, rather than memoir, it can come even closer to the gravity and extremes of the life of misery (punctuated by intense moments of pleasure, principally from drugs) experienced by the author. “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth” wrote Albert Camus. Patrick Melrose is no comedy, but there is acidic black wit, irony, and scorn jumping out of almost every page or scene. It is the grandiloquent composition of St Aubyn, a British writer, now in his late fifties and a father of two. The novels began to appear in 1991, and told the memoirish, deeply noir, and ceaselessly self-observant story of Patrick Melrose. He was repeatedly raped as a child by his father, David Melrose, who was penniless except for his wife's fortune. A gifted musician, and later a physician, David Melrose had been disinherited by his own father, a military man, a General; he went on to create nothing but pain throughout his life. Patrick, an only child, goes unprotected by his mother, a mid-western American heiress whose family fortune was derived from cleaning fluid and real estate. He was raised in grand luxury, quotidian cruelty, and limitless negligence. He soon became suicidal, addicted to alcohol and drugs, and brandished his own form of mental torture on those who dared to care for him, sparing himself none as well. The books were first a three-part ensemble, then added to until five were completed. After the success of the fifth book and the compilation of the sequence, Patrick Melrose also became a five-part TV show (2018), released by the Showtime channel in the USA, and Sky Atlantic in the UK. If you start with the TV show, as I suggest, be warned: you will likely get hooked, as does the lead character, Patrick Melrose, but in his case to whiskey, smack (heroin), cocaine, and a variety of other psychoactive pills. The TV series starts with book two, Bad News, a smart decision because the viewer is thrown mercilessly into a plot about intergenerational trauma, sexual abuse, addiction, and the staggering tale of a lost and dissolute man, Patrick Melrose. He is in his 20s, a heroin addict, and receives a call telling him his father has died—no great loss as we shall see. But he needs to go to New York City to fetch his ashes, setting the scene for a drug-hazed adventure into the cumulative effects of trauma and filial hatred. The scenes dart from present to past, from Heathrow to the East Side funeral home (“only the best will do”), from The Pierre hotel in New York (The Drake in the show) to the gutters of the city, from scoring the hardwood box of his father's cremated remains to scoring heroin and every other type of intoxicant—in order to ease his hatred of family and his self-loathing—from dealers who just as soon would kill him as deliver. Smack is Patrick's drug of choice, “…bring on the “cavalry”', he says, to achieve the force necessary to transport him away from his living nightmare, or to paraphrase Lenny Bruce, to touch the hand of God, who by all the evidence left Patrick before he stood a chance. The first book and second episode of the show, Never Mind, while beautifully written, is largely backstory, beginning when Patrick is 5 years old, and living with his defeated mother and abusive father on a vast estate in Provence. Were the Showtime series to have begun with this book, it would have run the risk of losing the viewer, for in the USA there are more than 600 new TV shows released each year; hence, the competition is stiff, and calls for starting us at an apogee of excitement. Not that Never Mind is pacific. Perhaps the most chilling scene in all the shows (and books) is a moment in this story after his father rapes Patrick, and then stares mercilessly at him and says that if he says a word, “I will snap you in two”. A formal dinner scene in Never Mind further shows us how the boy's fate was doomed, since there was no one to shelter him from a savage, paedophilic father and an alcohol and pill-laden mother. By the end of book or episode two, we have met an elegantly drawn set of characters: former and current British aristocrats, rich and guttural Americans, ambitious, gorgeous young women, and pompous and self-absorbed men. With few exceptions, and Patrick has not gotten there yet, there is no one to like and everyone to despise. We are at risk of becoming haughty ourselves, as we witness and judge this psychologically ragged crew. Yet the entourage is presented with such grand wit and irony that it holds our attention, wondering how this all could be possible, while recognising it was. We meet these characters in scenes at parties, centuries-old clubs, memorials, hospitals, Narcotics Anonymous meetings, and bedrooms everywhere. They include Nicholas Pratt, the most awful and hurtful, having run through six marriages and, early on, his downy companion, Bridget Watson-Scott; Julia, a major character in the TV show, though not so much in the books, who is too beautiful to bear and another means by which Patrick tries to destroys himself; Victor Eisen, a Jew and a notable British philosopher who could not find self-esteem if it rained upon him; Sonny Gravesend, later married to the plebian Bridget, with his bottomless fortune and yearning for a male heir; Princess Margaret, who shows us the art of demeaning and shaming, including the French Ambassador to the Court of St James; Patrick's wife's mother, who demonstrates how motherhood can be an afterthought; and others who absently march through a life without purpose. Some are not as awful as others. The one saint is Mary, whom Patrick meets and marries, and with whom he has two boys, Robert and Thomas. There is Anne, a Jewish-American journalist who takes a protective interest in Patrick when he was a boy, but could not shelter him, her enchantment with the British elite being her Achilles heel. And Johnny Hall, a fellow Etonian in the show, a psychoanalyst and former drug addict, who becomes Patrick's walking stick as he rebuilds from his devastations. Some Hope is the third installment, though we now realise this title is tongue in cheek, since the carnage builds and the future seems awfully dim. It is set 8 years after David Melrose dies, though he is never absent from Patrick's mind. At the centre of this episode is an extravagant dinner party (on an estate with an ancient Lord's name), the likes of which most of us will never encounter. Princess Margaret is the guest of honour, and she and others deliver humiliation in plentiful bunches. There is infidelity, sex, breakups, betrayal, and more matriarchal incompetency. In other words, it is a fabulous, dark comic opera, but without an orchestra. The fourth novel and episode is Mother's Milk, which of course, is rancid. The book changes voices: its narration begins with Robert, Patrick's 5-year-old son. It's a curious change that soon remits with Patrick taking the lead voice once again. The TV show did not use a child's perspective, which I preferred, since by then we know that no one can tell a story as well as Patrick. Patrick's mother, Eleanor, is a shallow, clueless, do-gooder, lacking the common sense to know how. She is ripe for exploitation, which soon comes her way. In one evanescent moment of self-reflection, Eleanor remarks how she and David were “going to do good”. They would turn their chateau into a home for alcoholics, which in fact it became, only there were just two residents, she and her husband (and later, of course, Patrick). Mother's Milk is a tale of loss: the loss of the wife and mother whom Patrick married as she gives herself over to their two boys when she can no longer brook her husband's self-destructiveness, and the loss of the family home as Patrick's mother endows the estate to an absurd new-age organisation led by charlatans. Patrick is the first in generations of Melrose men who must go about earning a living, as well as forbear the unctuous people his mother has given her property to, and thus her fortune. These fatuous, drum-beating, faux healers are led by the self-satisfied Seamus, whose charity is meant to benefit no one but himself and his two sycophants. We readers and viewers can't help but feel Patrick's (and his older son's) rage, and the inevitability of his relapse into addiction. In one moment of glorious wish-fulfillment, Eleanor, now aged and infirm, asks Patrick to kill her. He dryly remarks, that would be “…against the law”. Yet as a dutiful son, he goes about exploring how she could access euthanasia. Of course, once he finds a way and gets his hopes up, she reneges. In the TV show, they are at an airport en route to Switzerland when she changes her mind, making mother's milk bitter, once again. Eleanor was also abused by Patrick's father, her husband, which can explain her hollow self and blind obedience, but it is no excuse for her failure to do the one thing every mother must do—namely, protect her child. The fifth novel and episode, At Last, lances your heart. Finally, like in an ancient Greek play, all the characters who inhabited Patrick's early, elite, yet empty life, are dead, except him. We are exiting an epic story of rare brutalism, eloquently told. Patrick's mother has finally passed, and we join him during his tortured journey at her cremation and burial. There are some priceless moments of satire, at the church service and after-party, with characters fileted by St Aubyn's viciously keen literary knife. But, for Patrick, it seems no victory to have survived; his is a life of inner demons, of persistent cravings to depart from reality, once again, into the haze of alcohol and drugs. The Showtime series was written for the screen by David Nicholls, and is exceptionally faithful to the books, especially in the agony depicted and the mordant humour. Among his other credits are screenwriting for Far From The Madding Crowd (2015), one of my favourite British romantic dramas. Benedict Cumberbatch delivers a masterful and memorable performance as Patrick Melrose, taking us into the rarefied world of the British upper class and equally well into the drug-dealing streets and hovels of New York. He has been nominated for an Emmy Award, and no doubt also helped to achieve a nomination for the show as a whole. An essential message that runs throughout the telling of Patrick Melrose, explicitly stated by Patrick, is that “…nobody should do anything like that to anybody.” Indeed. Yet, we know that rape, neglect, abuse, domestic violence, and the other monstrous ways we humans hurt one another are ubiquitous, in about every society. In Patrick Melrose, St Aubyn has dissected families, individual psyches, social class, manners, addiction, and psychopathology. In a New Yorker interview from some years ago, St Aubyn said that it was psychoanalysis and the writing of the Patrick Melrose books that finally saved him. But we can imagine how carefully he still must walk on the thin ice that is his life. What was it about Patrick and Edward and their experiences that enabled them ultimately to end the transmission of intergenerational trauma and cruelty? These are grave troubles, and tough to escape. How could Patrick remain loyal, no less seek to love his paedophile father and absentee mother? These mysteries go unanswered for Patrick Melrose, and, of course, Edward St Aubyn. Attachment must run that deep. For Patrick Melrose see http://www.sho.com/patrick-melrose and https://www.sky.com/watch/title/series/9daa403f-ae7c-4b4e-9787-da0fcd4efa2e For Patrick Melrose see http://www.sho.com/patrick-melrose and https://www.sky.com/watch/title/series/9daa403f-ae7c-4b4e-9787-da0fcd4efa2e
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