Double Blind by Edward St. Aubyn

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 1, 2021

Philosophy, genetics, and mental illness are the building blocks of Double Blind. They rest on the foundation of family, the anchor of all Edward St. Aubyn’s work.

If it is about anything, Double Blind is about relationships. Nature is the setting that informs those relationships — in particular, a country estate called Howorth that has been given over to wilding. If we lived in a state of nature like the deer in Howorth, copulating freely and without attachment might be the natural thing to do. Perhaps it is the natural thing for humans to do when they are not in a relationship, but after relationships form, natural behavior could be too destructive to contemplate. That’s the philosophical question that confounds Francis, whose job is to give tours of Howorth while monitoring the resurgence of species.

Francis’ girlfriend is a biologist named Olivia. Notwithstanding Olivia’s pregnancy, Francis is tempted by Hope’s repeated offers of sex, beginning when they swim together in the nude. Nudity should be natural for Francis. He’s a naturalist who is restoring the cultivated fields of Howorth to their natural state. Nudity seems to be Hope’s preferred state — she sheds her clothing whenever she’s alone with Francis — making temptation, in the form of “grasping at Hope,” a force of nature that Francis struggles to resist.

Another key relationship involves Olivia’s friend Lucy Russell, whose bright future is threatened by a brain tumor. A venture capitalist and fund manager named Hunter Sterling persuaded Lucy to move to London and run a venture capital firm that focuses on science and technology. Since the offer gave Lucy an excuse to leave her rich American boyfriend, not much persuasion was needed. Lucy agrees to stay in Hunter’s London flat while she’s getting situated. Hunter is usually elsewhere, indulging in his cocaine-fueled life of megalomania. Hunter’s “love of power and money had acted as a proxy for love itself” until Lucy gave him cause to alter his perspective.

The final relationship of importance involves Olivia’s adoptive father. Martin Carr is a psychotherapist whose fascination with a schizophrenic patient named Sebastian pushes him toward his ethical boundaries when he begins to suspect that Sebastian, who was also adopted, might be related to Olivia.

An odd but amusing subplot involves the Catholic Church’s relationship with Lucy and Hunter. Lucy is developing a project called Brainwaves. The project scans the brains of people who are in a desirable state of mind and attempts to reconstruct those states in others using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. A Cardinal has tasked a Franciscan Abbot named Father Guido with making money from a brain scan of “the greatest mystic of modern time.” Using Brainwaves technology, the church plans to market a helmet that will stimulate the mystical centers of the brain by replicating the mystic’s brainwaves. Father Guido provides some comic moments as encounters and inadvertently enjoys a world that is foreign to his ascetic life.

When St. Aubyn isn’t developing relationships, his characters indulge in far-ranging discussions about the mind and the natural world. They talk about mental illness and genetics, the efficacy of psychotherapy, the relationship between socioeconomic status and the mental health diagnosis one is likely to be given, theories surrounding the development of consciousness, the nature of science (“Science is a subset of human nature and not the other way around,” Hunter opines), the tension between determinism and freedom, and the potential of immunotherapy as a cure for cancer. St. Aubyn advances a number of interesting thoughts, including the semantic use of “side effect” to “pretend that among the range of pharmaceutical effects caused by a medicine the undesirable ones were somehow incidental.” I also liked the notion that “experience accuses science of being reductionist and authoritarian, while science dismisses experience as subjective, anecdotal, and self-deceived.”

St. Aubyn tosses out dozens of well-formed thought pearls, many of which would make intriguing essays, but can they sustain a novel? The plot scatters its threads, never weaving them into a tight story. Digressive paragraphs about population biology and genetics go on for pages, interrupting any momentum toward telling a story.

The characters generate enough family drama to sustain two or three novels, but the drama gets lost in the swirl of ideas that St. Aubyn uses as a substitute for storytelling. The plot eventually reaches what seems like an arbitrary stopping point, leaving every thread dangling. The result is disappointing. Working intellectual intrigue into a plot is always welcome, but not at the expense of abandoning the plot, as if the writer realized that none of the stories he started were really worth telling.

And maybe they aren't. Francis' potential affair is hardly groundbreaking fiction, while Martin's therapeutic relationship with a possible relative of his adopted daughter seems a bit contrived. The Brainwaves subplot seems better suited to a science fiction comedy. Maybe St. Aubyn decided to plow all the plot threads under and let the story grow as a wilding in the reader's mind. Only the hapless Abott struck me as an original character, but St. Aubyn has enough talent to have grown his other story fragments into a literary garden if he had set his mind to it.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Dunbar by Edward St, Aubyn

Published by Crown Publishing/Hogarth on Oct. 3, 2017

Dunbar is part of the Hogarth Shakespeare series of novels that are — based on? inspired by? completely unrelated to? — a Shakespeare play. The publisher’s website uses the word “retelling” but that isn’t the most accurate descriptor, based on the novels in the series that I’ve read.

Dunbar shares some elements with King Lear (descent into madness, bequeathing a kingdom to two daughters while ignoring a third, family strife), but the story is more comedy than tragedy. The kingdom is a corporate empire; battles are waged by trading firms and corporate raiders rather than armies. Since no author is going to improve on Shakespeare, I think it best to view Dunbar as “inspired by” Lear and then ignore the inspiration entirely, reading the novel as a literary work that stands on its own. From that perspective, I give Edward St. Aubyn credit for writing a story that is amusing and entertaining if not particularly deep.

Henry Dunbar is off his meds, but only because he spit them into a plant next to his institutional bed. Dunbar is a media mogul, perhaps the world’s most powerful person, but his haughty daughters Abigail and Megan are making him take a “lovely long holiday” at a psychiatric hospital. Their goal is to take the Dunbar Trust private again, giving them control over the vast media organization. Dunbar’s daughter Florence, half-sister of Abigail and Megan, is kept in the dark about her father’s location as well as the future of the family business.

Complicit in Henry’s institutionalization is Dr. Bob, with whom both Megan and Abigail are enjoying sadistic sex, and who has been promised a seat on the Board and a healthy salary. But Dr. Bob is even more Machiavellian than the sisters, setting up a troika of self-interested villains for the reader to root against.

Not that Dunbar deserves the reader’s cheers. Dunbar might deserve a measure of pity, but his lifelong narcissism is largely to blame for his current state of lonely emptiness. His only friend (he’s betrayed all his past friends) is newly acquired, another patient who has gone off his meds and who facilitates Dunbar’s escape. But the friend only wants to escape to the nearest pub, while Dunbar (as always) has grander ambitions.

St. Aubyn uses dry British wit to make Dunbar the kind of modern family drama that exposes the dark side of each relevant family member. The two evil daughters only have a dark side, and St. Aubyn exploits their pettiness and self-absorption to substantial comedic effect, while never quite making them convincing characters. Characters in comedies are often exaggerated to make a point, but one downside to turning a Shakespearean tragedy into a comedy is that the story’s tragic aspects demand true villains and a truly tragic hero, not caricatures.

The plot involves a good bit of corporate intrigue, back-stabbing, and betrayal as various forces vie for control of Dunbar Trust. The plot’s focus, however, is on family intrigue. The ending abruptly veers toward darkness (St. Aubyn didn’t have much choice about that if he wanted to do even the most abstract retelling of Lear), but the darkness is incongruous, given that the story is played for laughs until that point. Nor is Dunbar a particularly meaty novel, despite its themes of betrayal. As a comedy, however, the story succeeds, and St. Aubyn’s prose is always a pleasure to read.

RECOMMENDED

A Clue to the Exit by Edward St. Aubyn

First published in Great Britain in 2000; published by Picador on September 1, 2015

Charlie Fairburn has six months to live. He’s a writer and he’d like to write about his impending death, but death is depressing so his agent (who wants him to continue writing screenplays) tells him to write something upbeat. Instead, Charlie sells his house, moves into a hotel, and begins work on a novel called On the Train, snatches of which appear as A Clue to the Exit moves forward.

As every starving artist intuits and as Charlie soon learns, luxury inhibits ambition, so Charlie embarks on a course that will relieve him of the burden of wealth and inspire creativity. His quest takes him to a casino, where parties and a beautiful gambler interfere with his ability to solve “the riddle of consciousness” via the literary exploration of death.

At some point, the beautiful gambler asks him why he’s writing what he’s writing -- what the point of it is -- and it’s a question I was asking, as well. She wants Charlie to meet his death by writing a celebration of life. Instead, he’s writing a story in which pretentious characters discuss the philosophical implications of quantum physics. While the questions they ask are worth pondering -- from Charlie’s dying perspective, the question is how to live consciously -- I agree with the gambler that the story is dry and lifeless. But that’s probably the point. As Charlie provides a pedantic explanation of the novel’s goals and the techniques he is using to achieve them, it becomes all the more clear that Charlie really doesn’t know what he wants to say.

It takes a shocking amount of time for a guy with six months to live who loves but is estranged from his daughter to figure out what is important in his brief remaining life. He gains some other worthwhile insights (people should not hurt others to make themselves happy) but they are less than profound. He also arrives at the conclusion that “consciousness and experience are synonymous.” I take his meaning (I feel the sun warming my face, therefore I am) but the words really aren’t synonymous.

I think Charlie's ultimate realization is that life is a collection of experiences which, again, is hardly a momentous epiphany. His last great insight is “the thing that is closest to us is the most mysterious” which made me wonder when Charlie was going to get around to dying. Someone who is devoting the end of his life to deep thoughts might want to come up with something more meaningful. Or better yet, opt for hedonism, since he’s still young enough to enjoy it.

Near the end of the novel, Charlie goes on something like a vision quest that struck me as laughable. Maybe it was intended as humor. My greatest reservation about this novel is that, while some scenes are amusing, I can’t tell whether it is meant to be taken seriously. If so, I can’t. If not, too many scenes are pointless to justify reading it as a comedy. There is an abundance of good writing here, but it never adds up to much.

NOT RECOMMENDED

On the Edge by Edward St. Aubyn

Published in Great Britain in 1998; published by Picador on October 14, 2014

On the Edge satirizes self-absorbed gurus who try to save the world by attending conferences where they can praise each other, people who mistake shallow thought for mindfulness, vision quests, Wicca, crystals, tantric sex, and pretty much all things associated with the marketing of New Age lifestyles. Edward St. Aubyn develops an appealing ensemble cast but doesn't do as much with the characters as I had expected.

Wealthy Brooke pays for New Age teacher Adam's San Francisco apartment and helps finance the book Kenneth is writing on a philosophy of his own invention called Streamism. Jason is a Brit also wants to start a world religion but not before he starts a successful rock band ... a project that, at age 33, seems unlikely. Angela has no boyfriend and thinks a tantric workshop would be a logical place to find one. Stan and (particularly) Karen Klotwitz are old-aged New Agers who, having retired to Santa Fe, are in California for the trantric workshop. Crystal and Jean-Paul do psychedelics in a canyon, ponder madness and mantras, and babble about language and culture. Peter has traveled from England to American to participate in the New Age scene because he wants a German woman named Sabine to believe the universe has brought them together again ... if only the universe will allow him to find her.

The plot, to the extent that one exists, brings the characters together as they explore their inner and outer selves. The meandering story has no discernable purpose beyond poking fun. Humor is an end in itself but it is difficult to sustain a one-note tune. While Edward St. Aubyn almost pulls it off, some lulls in the story felt like padding rather than character or plot development. My attention wandered during some of the lectures given by workshop teachers. The ending is also a bit abrupt.

Still, many books make me smile or chuckle but not many make me laugh. On the Edge provoked frequent laughter. Yes, some of its satirical targets are easy bull's-eyes, like the superficial pap that New Age workshop providers package and sell as profound thought. Yet even obvious humor can be funny if the humor is sufficiently witty. On the Edge is steeped in wit.

St. Aubyn's book is also filled with striking sentences. An example (the reference is to a woman's history with New Age workshops and gurus): "Again and again Crystal saw her [mother] set out with fawn-like credulity, only to end up stalking disappointment like a tigress, bringing it down expertly and living off it for days; ferocious, possessive, alone, while it putrefied beside her." The substance of On the Edge does not match the quality of the prose, but the prose -- and the laughs -- make the novel worthwhile.

RECOMMENDED