​Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale.
    With a new introduction by the author.
    New York: Anchor, 2017.
 
I suppose I always felt this book, originally published in 1986, was a woman’s book—chick lit—but after viewing the MGM/Hulu production of Atwood’s novel, I believe I was wrong. A dystopian world in which women are nothing more than baby makers and terribly devalued if they cannot deliver is not a world any of us want to live in. Such a world is also one in which all human beings are devalued, consigned to rigid gender and social roles. Atwood herself may articulate the novel’s greatest value in her new introduction:

Indeed. A novel in which almost half of the chapters are entitled “Night”—and are alternated with ones like “Jezebel’s” and “Salvaging”—readers should be duly warned that we, too, could descend into a world of moral darkness, that we should take heed from this, our literature of witness.

NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-20 Florida

​St. Aubyn, Edward. Patrick Melrose. New    
     York: Picador, 2015.
 
I more often read a novel before viewing a film version, but less often do I read the novel after tuning into something like, say, Showtime’s “five-part limited series,” of the same title. It is one of those series which may have been equal to the book, or books, because Patrick Melrose is a compendium of St. Aubyn’s five novels about the same character, and it unfolds almost as luxuriously as the book.

Patrick Melrose may be one of the best contemporary novels to come to grips with the life of a drug addict. But more important, I believe St. Aubyn traces the aspect of abuse within a family over several generations, and how, unaddressed, it can devastate a family—wealthy or not. Substance abuse is merely a symptom of the deeper problems buried in the Melrose family history.
 
Patrick Melrose, born in 1960, approximately the same time as his creator, experiences physical abuse when his father perpetrates sodomy on him at an early age—repeatedly over several years. But then there is also the emotional abuse, when Patrick’s father, David, swears Patrick to secrecy or he will be “very severely punished” (79). (In the film, he says he will snap him like a twig.)

​Patrick’s mother? Well, her abuse of him manifests itself as ignorance—blissful, willful ignorance of how David is treating their son. She, too, has suffered abuse as a child and at the hands of her husband, and they, without even trying, do their best to destroy Patrick’s life. What is most remarkable about this novel is that St. Aubyn manages to limn the skeletal remains of the several generations of this family without any shortcuts or platitudes. On the next to the last pages of the book, Patrick has earned the profound conclusions at which he arrives:

My God, in a nutshell, the entire novel portrays the unraveling of this moneyed British family, their accumulated abuses and how they lead to “drug and alcohol abuse” by Patrick, his chosen method of coping. Cause and effect, folks. Cause and effect.
 
I have only a couple of observations which might manifest themselves as criticisms: In spite of St. Aubyn’s lyrical and commanding prose, sustained over nearly nine hundred pages, I was often distracted. First, he participates in what American workshoppers call head-hopping, that is, employing the third-person omniscient point of view, not commonly used since the nineteenth century. Yet, I must probably applaud him because he manages to employ it with great skill, and, in a novel of this breadth, it is amusing and strategically important for the reader to know exactly what each character is thinking at any given time.

And two, the author uses, repeatedly, speech attributions which seem inappropriate or awkward. What do I mean? Any speech attribution, to my way of thinking, ought to be a synonym for the word “said,” or “spoke”: “declared,” “replied,” or similar verbs. Not so here: “The daughter is impossible,” grinned Laura (408). “Grin” is not a synonym for “said,” and it gives the sentence an amateurish patina. I wonder: Is this an acceptable practice in the writing of fiction within the United Kingdom? I should hope not. Another scathing example: “You may well ask,” scowled Nicholas (704). Seriously? How is “scowling” like “speaking?” This questionable practice is rife throughout the novel, marring what is otherwise impeccable prose, and could have been nipped in the bud by a good editor. Please help me to understand, Mr. St. Aubyn. Why would you do this to your book?

NEXT TIME: Final Installment of Defeating A Fib At Last