The story is painful; the setting all too familiar and real; writing suffused with irony, metaphors and witticisms - behold Mother's Milk. Hermoine Lee, the chair of the judges of this year's Booker entries, described this book as "wickedly funny." And she would be right.
I began this book with no particular enthusiasm, but a little research on the internet gave me enough background about the author to place the work in its context. And this work centres around one theme - the place of a mother in, and how it pervades into the depth of every aspect of, a simple family.
Patrick Melrose is suffering from a midlife crisis. His wife, Mary, has just given birth to her second son, Thomas, and has become extremely close to him - to the point of sacrificing her sexual, and to some extent, emotional connection with her husband. Patrick, the lawyer, successfully manages to pass on his sarcasm and twisted daggers of wit straight to his precocious first son, Robert, who, by the age of five, becomes a master in impersonating other people.
While St Aubyn takes us through the functioning of this rather functional family, we see each character in relation to their mother, and how it has shaped their past, present, and future. The contrast between self-sacrificing Mary's self-obsessed mother and the betrayed and disappointed Patrick's philanthropist and neglectful mother is incisive. The novel touches among various aspects of contemporary family life, particularly of parenting, marriage, relationships, trust, adultery, and euthanasia.
The novel is described through wide-ranging narratives during four summers of 2000 to 2003. The beauty of St Aubyn's prose lies in his choice of the person through whom he narrates each section. At first, we hear the funny and sometimes deceptively cruel Robert, and his slow transformation into the persona that is his father. Then comes Patrick himself, with his disappointment with his wife, his self-loathing, and the guilt he feels about committing adultery. Third comes Mary, and we see the maternal side to St Aubyn's story. The final summer is rather nondescript, and serves its purpose well.
The lack of any ciches, be it in the plot, the prose, or the characters, came as a welcome relief. The normality of the characters was most striking. One cannot elevate the moral stature of any character; nor would the intelligent reader. If he did, he is missing the author's loud and clear message.
The criticisms of the so-called New Age practices, and of the American lifestyle, particularly in the post 9/11 era, or as Patrick calls it, the 9/12 era, are well-founded, and in a style much reminiscent of Oscar Wilde mercilessly dissecting Victorian hypocrisies in his play, are explored with unabashed saracasm.
This book may not linger on in your mind as a powerful and evocative novel. But, it does have several thought-provoking ideas which merit consideration... If that is not good enough for you, you ought to read this novel for the sheer beauty of St Aubyn's prose.
