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Therapist Martin Carr is in a quandary. He has learnt that a new patient, Carmen, is already known to his adoptive daughter Olivia and her husband Francis. Yet his professional ethics are tested further when his “most traumatised patient”, Sebastian, turns out to be Olivia’s biological brother. “These things do not happen, cannot happen and must not happen,” he tells himself.
Sebastian and Olivia’s lives have run along parallel lines until, defying the laws of geometry but fulfilling the demands of fiction, they meet at the home of their biological mother, Karen. Olivia is outraged by Karen’s deceit, but her adoptive mother Lizzie counters that “It was terribly irresponsible, but I can imagine that she might have got lost in a fantasy world where it was a beautiful, redemptive act — the reconciliation at the end of a Shakespeare comedy.” This hope is lent credence by the echoes of Twelfth Night in the siblings’ names.
Edward St Aubyn, one of the most acclaimed novelists of his generation, is best known for the five semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose books, which make brilliant comedy out of the harrowing events of the protagonist’s early life, including childhood abuse, drug addiction and a country house party attended by a dyspeptic Princess Margaret. He revisits the theme of abuse in Parallel Lines, through the central character of Sebastian. Having been molested as an infant by his biological father, bullied as a child by his adoptive father and spent much of his adult life in hospital, he is in the fifth year of his analysis with Martin.
In a novel brimming with wordplay, Sebastian’s is the most characterful, whether he is mistaking “masturbating” for masticating or punning that “My shrink has made me a bigger man.” His responses are fresh and pertinent; on attending his first art opening, he assumes that people “were bound to be talking about Leonardo da Vinci”, and his eagerness to make meaningful connections is affecting.
St Aubyn’s parallel lines extend beyond the family to include Hunter, an American billionaire who is developing “Happy Helmets”, a system of “trans-cranial stimulation” which offers the user “a shortcut to the profound communion” that Italian mystic Blessed Fra Domenico devoted his life to attaining. There’s also Hunter’s wife Lucy, who suffers from an aggressive form of cancer, and Helio, a Brazilian nurse and artist. But with the exception of Father Guido, an abbot whose uneasy isolation in a hermitage is powerfully conveyed, the characters, including the family, remain undeveloped and defined largely by their intellectual and political concerns.
Thus Olivia and Francis are both professionally and personally preoccupied with the prospect of global extinction. Olivia is producing a series of radio programmes about the various pathways to Armageddon, while Francis is an environmental activist, involved in projects in South America. When not treating his patients, Martin focuses on the shortcomings in Lacan’s analytical methods. Hunter’s description of American light artist James Turrell’s heroic missions to rescue Buddhist monks from Chinese-occupied Tibet during the Vietnam war provide the real-life figure with a richer back-story than any of St Aubyn’s fictional ones, apart from Sebastian.
The novel bristles with ideas. Unlike Fra Domenico, who took a vow of silence since “show not tell was his philosophy”, St Aubyn opts to tell rather than show. So there are short, knotty digressions on subjects such as the nature of mental and visual perception, the limits of Christian compassion, the power of political activism and the discoveries of Humboldt and Darwin. The ideas are baldly presented, tending to clog the narrative rather than engage the reader.
The same is true of the overextended metaphors randomly distributed among the characters. Sebastian muses on changes to his routine being like waves behind a surfer; Olivia’s guilt being turned from an unwelcome gatecrasher into an honoured guest; Francis on the wrestling match between Gaia and Mammon; and Martin on both the cave system of a patient’s associations and the Borgia-like poison of Lacan’s methods within the span of a single page. With certain metaphors running to a dozen or more lines, they serve to obscure rather than enhance the initial thought.
When Sebastian first encounters one of Helio’s computerised light sculptures, a version of “The Birth of Venus” renamed “A Moment of Weakness” as a riposte to President Bolsonaro’s misogyny, he starts to think that “Helio’s work was in the joke-not-joke, play-on-words, art-about-art game”. There is a danger that St Aubyn’s writing here falls into the same trap. Sebastian is not alone in suffering from Witzelsucht — repeated wordplay — which both irons out distinctions between the characters and detracts from the novel’s serious intent.
St Aubyn is at his best in comic set pieces, which recall the brilliance of the Patrick Melrose quintet. Over dinner at a restaurant, Olivia and her family discuss the failings of recent Conservative politicians to hilarious effect, not least when a waiter asks about their allergies and she replies “Boris Johnson and his predecessors”. Likewise, at the art opening, the gallery owner, desperate to keep up with the latest trends in criticism, mistakes Sebastian’s naive remarks for unorthodox genius and asks him to write a catalogue essay. Overall, however, although the parallel lines of the novel converge, its individual elements fail to cohere.
Parallel Lines by Edward St Aubyn Jonathan Cape £20/Knopf $28, 272 pages
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