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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I'm Very Impressed,
By Ethan Cooper (Big Apple) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Some Hope (Paperback)
SOME HOPE is made up of three novellas, each featuring the experiences of Patrick Melrose during a 24-hour (±) ordeal. In each, St. Aubyn explores Patrick's relationship with David Melrose, his snobby, controlling, and repellent father.The first novella, NEVER MIND, shows Patrick as a wee boy as he suffers loneliness, neglect, and physical abuse. The second, BAD NEWS, follows Patrick in his early twenties on a hilarious and Herculean drug binge in New York City. The third, SOME HOPE, shows Patrick near thirty and free of addictions. At a party honoring Princess Margaret, he gets a stronger grip on his monstrous father's legacy and the allure of his snobbish world. The writing throughout these three novellas is absolutely sensational. If a good writer allows a reader to experience the life, aspirations, and psychology of his/her characters, St. Aubyn is a GREAT writer in this book. To a degree, this is due to his breathtaking metaphors and similes, which go beyond deft phrases to actually capture and define a moment or effect. Here are four that I like, two from BAD NEWS and two from SOME HOPE. o The heroin followed in a soft rain of felt hammers playing up his spine and rumbling into his skull. o Patrick sprung up the steps of the Key Club with unaccustomed eagerness, his nerves squirming like a bed of maggots whose protective stone has been flicked aside. o ...a couple of years earlier, he had started to realize what it must be like to be lucid all the time, an unpunctuated stretch of consciousness, a white tunnel, hollow and dim, like a bone with the marrow sucked out. o The two men fell silent and stared at the throng that struggled... with the same frantic but restricted motion of bacteria multiplying under microscope. This book is highly recommended. But I quibble on one point: Cabbies traveling from Kennedy Airport don't use the Williamsburg Bridge and The Avenue of the Americas to reach the Pierre. Instead, they take the Triborough Bridge and FDR Drive. Otherwise, fantastic!
26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good News,
By John Self "www.theasylum.wordpress.com" (Belfast, NI) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Some Hope (Paperback)
Tastes differ, and for me it's no concern that the characters are mostly awful when the writing - and that's what it's all about, after all - is as good as this:"She imagined vodka poured over ice and all the cubes that had been frosted turning clear and collapsing in the glass and the ice cracking, like a spine in the hands of a confident osteopath. All the sticky, awkward cubes of ice floating together, tinkling, their frost thrown off to the side of the glass, and the vodka cold and unctuous in her mouth." Volume one of the trilogy - Never Mind - tells the story simply of a gathering at the house, in France, of an upper-class English couple, David and Eleanor Melrose. Eleanor, an alcoholic, is wealthy by birth and David married her for her money, though that's the least of his vices. He's an out-and-out villain, whether making his wife eat her dinner from the floor like a dog, or exerting power over his five-year-old son Patrick in the most disturbing ways. Their guests are not much better, and when the book ended I was both glad to see the back of such a bunch of upsetting misfits, and sorry to finish such a beautifully-written performance in prose. Even in the depths of depravity St. Aubyn is a pleasure to read, his writing full of life and the sort of subdued wit you know you will laugh at much more the second time around. A word, by the way, about the title of the three volumes. I just love them. Never Mind. Bad News. Some Hope. Their stark, bare, blankness mixed with tiny ambiguities - like the names of exhibits at a modish art exhibition - makes me chuckle just to look at them. Never Mind sums up the coolly distant narrative voice, glossing over the horrors which David Melrose inflicts on his 'loved' ones. Bad News speaks literally of the central piece of information in the second book - that David Melrose has died - but ironically, because for his son Patrick, now 22 years old, it is very good news indeed. It is also reflective of Patrick himself, walking bad news if ever there was, a hopelessly out-of-control drug addict who spends the two days that the book covers, in New York to make arrangements after his father's death, in a stew of hallucinations and desperate fix-addiction. But as a portrait of addiction it's as laugh-out-loud funny as it is gripping. Some Hope, finally - the third volume, as well as the title Picador have given to the overall series for this reissue - is a deliciously simple but subtle double-entendre, a rolled-eyes dismissal of the possibility of anything good coming from the contents of Never Mind and Bad News - but also a good-hearted acknowledgement of the existence of that possibility, however small. Not 'very much hope', then, but 'some hope' nonetheless. Just wonderful. It's a shame then that in the new Picador omnibus edition, these superb, perfect titles are reduced mostly to the status of chapter headings. Anyway. Whereas Bad News gives us mostly the world from the eyes of Patrick Melrose, Some Hope returns to the multiple voices of Never Mind. This seems like a retreat, and Some Hope is at its strongest when in Patrick's mind (now thirty, and in recovery from his drug use), and at other times seems winsome and cutely aphoristic, which over time - though it's only 150 pages - can get irritating, just the way page after page of Oscar Wilde's paradoxes can. One quip goes a mightly long way. Nonetheless, the portrait of Princess Margaret is a triumph, and the whole trilogy has a cumulative power that takes it to the highest echelons of modern English writing. And the Best News is that the stand-alone sequel, Mother's Milk, is even better.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but patchy, and ought to come with 18 warning,
By Raphael (London) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Some Hope (Paperback)
I think if a novel is going to have such graphic and shocking scenes as this one has (I won't spoil it for you) then there ought to be some hint that the reader is going to be subjected to that on the cover. Lets put it this way; this would have an 18 rating if it were a film. I got part way through and was absolutely traumatised by what I read. He's a powerful writer and really gets under your skin, which makes the trauma even worse. The characters he creates are very believable to the point where they become almost real. I thought the writing was patchy, as though he had got slightly bored about a third of the way through, but then it picked up again. I also think that it's not a very realistic portrayal of the nature of childhood abuse and recovery. I think if you're going to write about such a touchy subject you really should speak with accuracy and authority on it. By the end I was kind of reminded of Jilly Cooper's books in the way that it portrayed the upper classes, and I found that very cliched. People are no more or less nice because they are from privileged backgrounds, and some rich people are very positive while others are more like the people in this book. It's an easy punt to have a go at the 'in crowd', but in my mind it detracts from the writer's obvious talent for psychological insight and believable writing.
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