- Hardcover: 192 pages
- Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd (13 Jun 1994)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0434734543
- ISBN-13: 978-0434734542
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 581,078 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Some Hope
and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Plus, get an extra £5 Gift Certificate when you trade in books worth £10 or more before June 30, 2012. Visit the Books Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
‘Humor, pathos, razor-sharp judgement, pain, joy and everything in between. The Melrose novels are a masterwork for the twenty-first century, by one of our greatest prose stylists’ Alice Sebold
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
Product Description
This novel completes the trilogy which began with "Never Mind" and "Bad News". Patrick Melrose finds himself at a party for 500 "top people" in the Gloucestershire countryside. Here the themes of incest, privilege, royalty and corruption intertwine.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
39 of 40 people found the following review helpful
Format: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!
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!
27 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Format: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.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A patient bought me this book through Amazon and gave it to me to read as I only had the last of the Trilogy and the two eairler books were out of print. I loved it. Unfortnuately, the author's experiences are so typical of those of many poeple who end up as addicts, with the only difference being that of social class. The writing is spare and the description of the downward descent so vivid, that the life in recovery is so illuminating. I think that it was right not to include the rehab and it shows that it takes time, with a clear head, to achieve acceptance, forgivness and mental peace. MWD Rowlands
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
I want a medal for finishing this!
I'm starting to think this may be a "marmite" book. I bought Some Hope after reading a rave review about it in the Guardian. Read more
Published 5 months ago by clara76
Good, but patchy, and ought to come with 18 warning
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... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Raphael
catch up with this if you haven't already
just caught up with this trilogy, but what a combination of stunning dialogue and observational comedy allied to dramatic content! Read more
Published 11 months ago by neil fraser CP
A brilliant writer
An utterly brilliant novel charting the appalling behaviour of the English upper classes. This may sound narrow but it is not. Read more
Published 12 months ago by Grace Jackson
Savage Portrayal
This is a savage portrayal of an abusive childhood, addiction and recovery. The writing is powerful and the description vivid - perhaps a little too vivid in the portrayals of drug... Read more
Published 12 months ago by C. Wright
Some Hope
"Some Hope" is the third part of The Patrick Melrose Trilogy, the first two parts being "Never Mind" and the second "Bad News". Read more
Published 13 months ago by S Riaz
Some Hope trilogy
Haven't read it yet but delivery though slow was eventually ok, book well-packaged and in good nick.
Published on 15 Sep 2009 by Mr. P. Marriott
Depressingly good
Don't read this book if you want to be a writer. St Aubyn is one of our greatest living authors, and yet this book is largely unknown. The stuff of genius. Neglected genius.
Published on 7 Aug 2007 by Vonschlaf
Beautifully written, but...
...not to my taste. The realism with which St Aubyn portrays the people involved is praiseworthy, but the people are so unlikable and their lives so unbearable that it was not... Read more
Published on 23 Feb 2006 by Big Ben
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Fiction > Contemporary Fiction
- Books > Humour > Fiction
- Books > Humour > Rural Life
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
