Bad News

Patrick Melrose #2

by Edward St. Aubyn

Twenty-two years old and in the grip of a massive addiction, Patrick Melrose is forced to fly to New York to collect his father’s ashes. Over the course of a weekend, Patrick’s remorseless search for drugs on the avenues of Manhattan, haunted by old acquaintances and insistent inner voices, sends him into a nightmarish spiral. Alone in his room at the Pierre Hotel, he pushes body and mind to the very edge – desperate always to stay one step ahead of his rapidly encroaching past.

Bad News was originally published, along with Never Mind and Some Hope, as part of a three book omnibus also called Some Hope.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, British Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, 20th Century, Audiobook

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Edward St Aubyn was born in London in 1960. He was educated at Westminster school and Keble college, Oxford University. He is the author of six novels, the most recent of which, ‘Mother’s Milk’, was shortlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, won the 2007 Prix Femina Etranger and won the 2007 South Bank Show award on literature.

His first novel, ‘Never Mind’ (1992) won the Betty Trask award. This novel, along with ‘Bad News’ (1992) and ‘Some Hope’ (1994) became a trilogy, now collectively published under the title ‘Some Hope’.

His other fiction consists of ‘On the Edge’ (1998) which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and A Clue to the Exit (2000).

Reviews

[Glenn Sumi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, Mr. St. Aubyn. What a descent into hell this was. Albeit a well-written, mordantly funny descent into hell.

There are scenes in your fked up novel - the second in your Patrick Melrose series - I will never forget. I’m surprised I even had the stomach to finish it. Needles, after all, make me squeamish. And details about injecting stuff into various body parts, finding and then losing veins, blood rushing into syringes... ugh.

I can only say the experience of reading your book was like slowly driving by a fatal car crash on the highway. Disturbing, but impossible to look away. And after hearing that this series was semi-autobiographical, well, I’m so glad you survived this chapter in your life, sir.

***

In his early 20s, the London-based Patrick learns that his horrible father - the same monster who molested him as a child in book one - has died in New York. And so he flies across the pond to view the body and collect the ashes.

Patrick decides to grieve in his own way: by going on one doozy of a two-day drug binge. His regular New York dealer isn’t answering his phone, and so he tries securing drugs in other ways, which nearly gets him killed.

Once he scores some real quality stuff, however - heroin, cocaine, quualudes, etc. - he’s set.

The famous chapter seven recounts his incredible drug-induced high, and it’s rendered as some phantasmagorical nightmare that’s alternately funny and frightening: Looney Toons meets William Burroughs.

Another chapter recounts a disastrous meal that finds Patrick not eating but puking his guts out in an exclusive men’s club washroom. Absolutely bilious - literally.

And throughout it all, Patrick is thoroughly unlikeable. Entitled, selfish, unconcerned about those around him (there are various women in his life, not very carefully detailed). He just needs a fix - in both senses of the word.

The prose in this second Melrose novel isn’t as consistently fine as it was in the elegant first book, but I don’t think St. Aubyn cares. The POV is mostly Patrick’s, and it’s almost cathartic to follow him on his spiralling, self-destructive path.

St. Aubyn’s one misstep is to shift the POV to a couple of other characters in the final third. (The first novel leapt from character to character and was at least consistent.)

By the end of Patrick’s journey - he himself compares it to the Odyssey at one point - he is so thoroughly debased and degraded that, incredibly, we eventually feel pity for him. And only after I flipped back to the first chapter did I see that the book opens and closes with the same image: “Patrick pretended to sleep.” Living with his demons, he can’t find any real rest or solace - just drug-induced imitations.

Can’t wait to read the third book in this appropriately addictive series.

[Анастасія ꒰⁠⑅⁠ᵕ⁠༚⁠ᵕ⁠꒱⁠˖⁠♡ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Поставила 3 тільки через те, що було цікаво читати про наркотики, все. І крім цього майже взагалі нічого немає. І я можливо пропустила момент, де пояснювали що з його матер'ю, бо за всю книжку я її наче не бачила і навіть згадок не пам'ятаю. Єдине радує, що Девід мертвий, але цей момент псується від того, що люди висловлюють співчуття через смерть його батька, при цьому кажучи, що він був чудовою людиною. Іноді людська тупість та незнання дуже дратують. А особливо, коли вони знають, що ця людину далеко не ідеальна, але їх виставляють у такому ракурсі.

[Glenn Russell]

Bad News picks up on the story of Patrick Melrose where Patrick, age twenty-two, receives news of his father's death. “Perhaps he would need all his courage not to dance in the street, not to smile too broadly.” The reason for Patrick's elation goes back to his childhood as described in detail in Never Mind, the first novel in the British author's autobiographical series, where, as a child, his sadistic father subjected Patrick to unending emotion abuse, physical abuse, and (gasp! gulp! gasp again!) sexual abuse.

Patrick is obliged to travel to New York to claim his father's ashes. Once on the Concorde, emotionally distraught and drug-starved, Patrick encounters the ultimate British nightmare: a bigmouth American, former Army pilot in Vietnam, a wheeler dealer off the pages of Melville's The Confidence-Man who calls him Paddy and expects Patrick to be his good buddy and listen enthusiastically as he, Earl Hammer, hammers him with a constant stream of his own degraded personal shit. Well, at least he's on the Concorde; he's so grateful. Patrick thinks the airline should advertise: “It's because we care, not just for your physical comfort, but for your mental health, that we shorten your conversations with people like Earl Hammer.”

New York is the perfect setting for this Edward St. Aubyn novel. Similar to Anthony Burgess' British poet Enderby in Clockwork Testament, the contrast between a highly educated, literary Brit and a gaggle of Americans makes for stinging satire that's fueled by Patrick's need of these men and women to fulfill his unquenchable hankering for drugs and sex. Patrick's emotional, drug-induced floundering and bellyflops bring to mind the wise words of philosopher Epicurus, "Nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little".

Ah, biting British satire. Critics and reviewers frequently liken St. Aubyn to Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene but I see his literary antecedents reaching back to Anthony Trollope. Here's a quick character sketch where Patrick takes the elevator to his room in a swank hotel on the Upper East Side:

“Patrick caught sight of himself in a large gilt mirror, and noticed that, as usual, he looked rather overdressed and extremely ill. There was a disturbing contrast between the care with which the clothes had been assembled and the ease with which the face looked as if it might fall apart. His very long black overcoat, dark blue suit, and thin black and silver tie (bought by his father in the early sixties) seemed to be unrelated to the chaotic tangle of brown hair which surrounded his dead-white and shiny face. The face itself was in a spasm of contradiction. The full lips were pinched inward, the eyes reduced to narrow slits, the nose, which was permanently blocked, forced him to breathe through his open mouth and made him look rather imbecilic; and a frown concentrated his forehead into a vertical crease directly above the nose.”

If you read Trollope's character sketches of the likes of Obadiah Slope and Bertie Stanhope in Barchester Towers, you'll see striking similarities. Actually, I think there's more than a small measure of Bertie Stanhope's character in Patrick Melrose.

Bad News is a howler. I laughed heartily several times on every single page. And so, so well written. A quartet of memorable scenes:

Patrick takes a taxi to Tompkins Square in Alphabet City to score some smack on the street. Fortunately, his longtime pal Chilly Willy saves him in the nick of time: otherwise, Patrick would have scored a knife in the gut. Hey, Patrick! Parading around as a rich dude buying drugs at night down in the East Village amounts to nothing less than a death wish.

Back in his hotel room, after shooting up with heroin, Patrick's mind becomes a vaudeville stage for a long lineup for such as The President, Nanny, Honest John, The Vicar, Attila the Hun. A snip of the drama: "Attila the Hun (basso profundo): 'Die, Christian dog! (Decapitates the Vicar.) Vicar's Severed Head (pausing thoughtfully): 'You know, the other day, my young granddaughter came to me and said, 'Grandfather, I like Christianity.'" Much of the juicier action of the novel takes place in Patrick's head and Chapter 7 counts as exhibit A.

At dinner, in the company of older men, his mind completely fried by drugs, we read: “He sat astonished in front of the menu, as if he had never seen one before. There were pages of dead things – cows, shrimps, pigs, oysters, lambs – stretched out like a casualty list, accompanied in a brief description of how they had been treated since they died – skewered, grilled, smoked, and boiled. Christ, if they thought he was going to eat these things they must be mad.”

Patrick picks up Rachel at a nightclub. They go to a diner where Rachel gorges herself on chili and a banana split.
“'I feel kinda nau-tious,' complained Rachel, as they went up in the hotel elevator.
'I'm not surprised,' said Patrick severely, 'I feel nauseous and I was only watching.'
'Hey, you're pretty hos-tel.'”

Ha! Many readers label Patrick a snob. But considering all the grotesqueries he witnesses in New York, many of his responses are amazingly appropriate. Case in point: Rachel made me nauseous – and I only read about her stuffing herself like a farmer's prize pig.

Count me as a new Edward St. Aubyn fan. I'm on to Dunbar and plan to return to the other Patrick Melrose novels. Tally-ho!

[Paul Bryant · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who eat up my people as they eat bread.

Every one of them is gone back: they are altogether become filthy; there is none that doeth good, no, not one.


Psalm 53.

******


I cannot be the only reader of Bad News who by page 20 had already cast the gold-medallist of supercilious contempt Richard E Grant of Withnail and I



as Patrick Melrose, the ghastly rich 22 year old English junkie. As soon as young Melrose stares into the room, his eyes like slits, his pallor of the grave, his disdain strong enough to support a family of five, and says "I don't fucking believe it" Richard E Grant's freezing upper-class tones are in your head to the last page.
Which is a good thing.

Sample Withnail dialogue:

Withnail: [on the way to the car] At some point or another I want to stop and get hold of a child.
Marwood: What do you want a child for?
Withnail: To tutor it in the ways of righteousness, and procure some uncontaminated urine.

Later

Withnail: [seeing a road sign reading "ACCIDENT BLACK SPOT. DRIVE WITH EXTREME CARE"] Look at that, accident black spot! These aren't accidents! They're throwing themselves into the road gladly! Throwing themselves into the road to escape all this hideousness!

Sample Melrose observation:

Patrick looked down the avenue. It was like the opening shot of a documentary on overpopulation. He walked down the street, imagining the severed heads of passers-by rolling in the gutter in his wake.

Later at a restaurant :

"Would you care for a dessert, sir?"
A rather bizarre question. How was he supposed to "care for" a dessert? Did he have to visit it on Sundays? Send it a Christmas card?

This is a black hole junkie memoir presented as a novel, three days in the life, where Patrick's dad has died in New York and he has to go and collect the body and get it cremated. Patrick has had a difficult relationship with his father. He's lugging a box full of his father's ashes around New York and a thought suddenly strikes him:

Patrick realised that it was the first time he had been alone with his father for more than ten minutes without being buggered, hit or insulted.

These early experiences have soured his demeanor:

He hated happy families with their mutual encouragement, and their demonstrative affection, and the impression they gave of valuing each other more than other people. It was utterly disgusting.

Patrick is always alone, especially when he's with people. There is no other in this novel. Only I. It's the Story of I, the Story of an I, a junkie I, the delirious whirl of fixes and highs and rushes and comedowns, and hold on, aren't we bored of all that? But great writing is never the what, only the how. Not what you are talking about, but how. As I read this deliciously disgusting stuff a song sang itself in my ear : I want to tell you. My head is filled with things to say. But when you're near, all those things they seem to. Slip away. Actually that's the precise opposite of Patrick. He doesn't want to tell anyone. He wishes, like a previous champion hater, that the human race had only one neck and he had his hands round it. Except he'd never do that, he'd be nodding out in a bath and nearly drowning. There would be someone unconscious in the bedroom but he wouldn't remember who it was or that they were there.

Patrick is so rich he has three Faberge eggs with his crispy bacon, he flies to New York on Concorde, he shacks up at a five star hotel and he goes scoring in Alphabet City just for some fun colour contrast. Cue missed main vein, horrific black arm bulging, fever in the scum brown bowl, sort of thing. Patrick the dreadful junkie considers himself superior to some others he knows:

At least he wasn't fixing in his groin. Gouging around unsuccessfully among those elusive veins could make one question the whole intravenous method of absorbing drugs.

Yes, I imagine it would.

There are way too many memoirs of chemical misbehaviour already in print, tiresome tales of debauch, debouch and degradation and who needs another?

– my own picks to click would be

Wonderland Avenue by Danny Sugerman (the shower scene which has more blood than the one in Hitchcock's Psycho is indelible, my dears, indelible)

Junky by Billy Burroughs

Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh – stop what you're doing and read that one next! You already did? Okay!

Fear and Lothing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson

All comedies, all very funny, you have to laugh. And all sort of true.

So, I can't sell you Bad News as anything other than another fierce example of why many thoughtful people have concluded that the only decent thing left for the human race to do is to get off Planet Earth now, just leave, don't look back, give the place back to the voles and the meerkats and the manatees and the pottos and the aardvarks and the Tasmanian devils and the golden tamarins



and the trapdoor spiders and all those creatures not cursed with the self-consciousness which is the glory and the horror of humans and which makes a Dachau for every cathedral and a Tuol Sleng for every symphony, the it seems to me inseparable glory and horror, to think you can have one without the other is utopian.

I knock a star off for a long passage which is a blatant steal from the Circe chapter of Ulysses and for some really crass caricatures of rich Americans, come on St Aubyn, you don't need to do that, but otherwise, if you like the blackest of comedy, yes.

Onward to the third Melrose novel.

[Helle · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5 stars) Edward St Aubyn is a really clever man. He has managed to write a novel whose protagonist is a selfish, tragic, upper-class drug addict and whose content I disliked throughout nearly the entire book. Yet, I am helplessly drawn to this series about Patrick Melrose because St Aubyn just writes so damn well:

The four Valiums he had stolen from Kay had helped him face breakfast, but now he could feel the onset of withdrawal, like a litter of drowning kittens in the sack of his stomach.

Bad News is the second book in the series about Patrick Melrose, who is now a grown man. His life hasn’t exactly picked up since we left him in Never Mind. He receives some ‘bad news’ at the beginning of this novel – his father is dead – and he travels to New York to collect his father’s remains. Thus begins his descent into his own private hell, in which his constant focus is where to get his next fix from, how best to combine cocaine and smack, when to pop in a Quaalude to soften the blow, and how to get through normal events like lunch with a friend without collapsing or offending people when he side-steps their unwelcome commiserations.

The extreme, not to say versatile, drug addiction reminded me of The Goldfinch (though that is newer), and Patrick even has a foreign junkie friend who speaks with an accent (like Boris in The Goldfinch). Thematically, the novel also reminded me of some of Alan Hollinghurst’s novels, the way the protagonists float through their lives, addicted to drugs or sex, without a firm hold on the world.

Once again, the caustic wit that St Aubyn delivers so assuredly, though in smaller doses than in # 1 (the drugs claim rather a lot of space here), is worthy of Waugh or Wilde, as are his constant tone of amused contempt and self-loathing irony (Patrick Melrose, though fictitious, is by all accounts St Aubyn’s alter ego). Patrick is a suicidal junkie who is not only scornful of most people who inadvertently cross his path but also so addicted to drugs that he thinks he may be in love with them. He has made a miserable island of his life:

He continually longed for an uncontaminated solitude, and when he got it he longed for it to stop.

But then all solutions were temporary, even death, and nothing gave him more faith in the existence of an afterlife than the inexorable sarcasm of Fate. (…) Who could guess what exquisite torments lay ahead in the holiday camps of eternity?

A whole chapter in the middle is devoted to Patrick’s insane hallucinations after a particularly successful fix. A cacophony of voices have an outrageous and surreal discussion in which nothing makes sense, yet it is somehow absurdly funny. A small sample:

Television (snivelling and shivering): ‘Turn me on, man. Gimme me a turn-on.’

Mr. President: ‘Ask not what your television can do for you, but what you can do for your television.’

Ecstatic populace: ‘Hooray! Hooray!’

Mr. President: ‘We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship…’

Von Trapp Family Singers (ecstatically): ‘Climb every mountain!’

Despite the awe-inspiring prose and the clear evidence of St Aubyn’s intellect and wit (which I simply adore), I felt weighed down by the sheer extent of Patrick’s drug abuse and his morbid take on life. It is hardly surprising given his upbringing (viz. Never Mind), and it felt utterly real, but I did not love this novel as I did the first one. (I hope things look up for him in the books to come. I’m hopeful that they do as the next one is called Some Hope).

With every situation – and he was always getting himself into situations – he saw the choices stretching out crazily, like the broken blood vessels of tired eyes. And with every action he heard the death cries of all the things he had not done.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read the first Patrick Melrose volume, Never Mind, in June and found it so unpleasant I was unsure whether to continue with the series. I’m glad I did. This is a blackly comic look at two days in the life of a drug addict who comes to New York City to see his father’s body and take away his ashes for scattering. Oh the meals, parties and (mostly) drug-taking Patrick crams into 48 or so hours! Chapter 7 is full of the most wonderful chorus of voices that comes to him as he’s tripping. Whenever he’s not high, he’s thinking of how he will next get high – “torturing his body to gratify his mind.”

If you’re squeamish about needles and blood you might not want to pick this one up, but I found it to be a fascinating fictional counterpart to Bill Clegg’s Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man, with such almost loving descriptions of the effects of drugs that you can start to see why someone would nearly destroy themselves over them: “Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favourite cushion” and “It was coming home. It was Ithaca, the end of all his storm-tossed wanderings.”

Patrick is horrid with his misanthropic inner monologue but also often very funny, and I loved how St. Aubyn took what should be a climactic scene – coming face to face with his dead father, the monster who abused him for years – and turns it into farce. “This was it, the big moment: the corpse of his chief enemy, the ruins of his creator” … and then he’s shown into the wrong room of the funeral home and finds a lighthearted farewell taking place for a Hermann Newton. “Tu regrettes qu’il est mort?” a French dealer acquaintance asks him. “Non, absolument pas, je regrette qu’il ait vécu,” Patrick replies. [You’re sorry that he’s dead? / No, absolutely not; I regret that he lived.]

St. Aubyn delivers such excellent lines and images: crouched in the back seat of a car, Patrick finds “his hip bone was persecuting his liver”; cruising past in a cab, he sees “Crossword puzzles of lit and unlit offices slipped by cluelessly.” There are also a few nice sprinklings of the phrase “never mind,” and the novel begins and ends with a variation on the phrase “Patrick pretended to sleep.” I’m not sure I’ll read it, but when I flipped to the start of Some Hope, the next book in my library’s omnibus volume, I was pleased to see it start with “Patrick woke up.”

Another favorite passage:

“He checked the pills again (lower right pocket) and then the envelope (inside left) and then the credit cards (outer left). This nervous action, which he sometimes performed every few minutes, was like a man crossing himself before an altar – the Drugs; the Cash; and the Holy Ghost of Credit.”

[Ammar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Melrose Saga continues.

Name: Patrick Melrose
Age: 22
Occupation: Rich Addict
Location: Pierre Hotel, New York
Reason: In New York to collect the body of his father David Melrose who passed away.

This book focus on Patrick most of the time. We see the real addict in him, the way he needs to fill that void in him.. the joy and happiness that some bad news brings to him and let him on a wonderful spiral down the abyss.

[Jason Koivu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oof! This is an epically depressing game of chutes and ladders. The degradation is so very sad-making, and yet, there is a beauty here, at least in the writing. Patrick Melrose's suppression of the demon's of his past with a drug binge described in vivid detail is a marvel to behold. I wish I hadn't. It's made me absolutely miserable...which is how I know the author is on his game! On to book three, which I'm led to believe holds some hope in it...at least in the title.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

That was one hell of a celebration, Patrick.
This spree of alcohol and drug-fueled self-loathing drags the reader along in a juddering skid through his familiar gutters.
The density of the metaphors is outdone only by the recklessness of the drug use. Both were magnificent.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The tragedy of old age when a man is too weak to hit his own child. No wonder he had died.

More bitter, more scabrous than Never Mind, this second of the Melrose novels is set 17 years later: it's now 1982 and Patrick is both independently-wealthy and a confirmed junkie. A trip to New York to collect his father's ashes is the context for a drug-fuelled orgy of self-loathing, and risky, quasi-suicidal behaviour.

What lifts the book from the gutter where Patrick, just about metaphorically, revels is the marvellously raw and visceral depiction of the highs and lows of shooting up, and the intelligent awareness of his consciousness. Organised with references to King Lear (' 'Let me not go mad,' shouted Patrick in a voice that started like his own, but became more like John Gielgud's with the last two words') and the Odyssey, with the references to Ithaca, homecoming and a funny/nausea-inducing 'pig' episode. Given the title of the next volume, Some Hope, I'm assuming this is the nadir, Patrick Melrose's descent into the underworld.

Short enough to rocket through, this is dark and blackly - what? comic is too simple a word and doesn't do justice to the layers of self-knowledge and self-contempt that, nevertheless, cannot quite dampen the shaky yet knowing, sardonic, deeply ironic voice of Patrick Melrose.

[Mark Joyce · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bad News has strong similarities with the weaker novels of Brett Easton Ellis, in that it's a studiedly unpleasant, occasionally very funny but ultimately monotonous and forgetable depiction of a drug addicted misanthrope. For the same reason there are also parallels with Irvine Welsh, except St Aubyn's smackhead is a self-pitying English aristocrat rather than a violent Scottish sociopath. Irvine Welsh and Brett Easton Ellis are both perfectly decent authors that I've enjoyed reading, so that's not intended to be a dismissive comparison. However, the fawning reviews for the Patrick Melrose Novels led me to expect something a lot more substantial and interesting. Two books in and I'm still struggling to see what all the fuss is about.

[christa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, nuts. I practically lit “Bad News,” the second book of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series off of the first super innovative, funny, dark, mind-blowing first novel of the series and meh. It turned out be a dud follow up to a book that made me shoot exclamation points from my pores.

In the first book, Patrick Melrose is a 5-year-old daredevil with the first assholic buds forming in his personality. “Never Mind” is a day in the life of his parents, their friends and the kid and the story is told in a way that takes a leisurely stroll from perspective to perspective, in the way you might overhear conversations as you walk through a mall. It is all headed toward a very uncomfortable and terrible dinner party. But before that, Patrick will be the victim in an especially ugly violation and maybe not even fully understand what has happened to him.

The second book opens about 20 years later. Patrick Melrose’s wretched father has died and he is on his way to New York City to pick up the ashes. Luckily, he’s flying Concorde because, like a heightened case of his mother in Book One, it takes a careful calibration of drugs to level him out and booze can only sustain him for so long.

Once again, the story covers a short span of time. This time the story is mostly internalized as Patrick meets with old family friends, tries to score bunches of drugs, picks up the remains of David Melrose, outwardly expresses that he despised his father but seems to be inwardly circling a more complicated set of emotions, gets suicidal, hallucinates, takes a dangerous amount of drugs, passes out in a bathroom and attempts to cheat on the adoring girlfriend he barely tolerates.

The unfortunate thing about reading in 2013 is that there are no end to the addiction memoirs and 80s drug fiction and having this sort of background knowledge lessens the impact this story might have had in the mid-1990s when it was published. Though, as that is still a post-McInerney, post-Ellis era, it must have felt at least kind of tired at the time. Also, St. Aubyn’s skill as a writer with a great eye for details works against him and his drug scenes get bogged down with missed veins, blackened points of needle entry, muddled shoot ups and dropped syringes and if you’ve never considered the dance between Cocaine and Heroin, it’s a little tough to follow.

Toward the end of the story, St. Aubyn taps into another strength: His stereo of character voices. Except it doesn’t really work here. It’s too little, too late and comes off as clunky rather than as clever as it was in the first novel. I suppose it would get exhausting to write the same way for each installment of a five-book series, but I kept thinking to myself: “Why can’t you be more like your first book?”

Whatever. I’m in now. Moving on to “Some Hope.”

[Leslie · Rating 3 out of 5]

So ok. Tiny recap in case you missed my review of the first one. I bought this series before the Showtime miniseries with Benedict Cumberbatch was in the works. I did not read book one until I saw they were making a show. I didn’t love it but I liked it and the author can write a sentence that’s painfully gorgeous. I started book two with the intention of reading all five before trying the show. I was mildly invested. Still, overall loving his writing. Noticing more in this book how he can really ramble and seems awfully pleased with himself in places. I can’t explain it. (Maybe the increase in rambling is due to the whole book being in the mindset of someone on drugs?) Then, last weekend, Showtime had a free trial and I caved to my love of Benedict and binged all five episodes. Oops. I rarely watch things before reading the books. Number one-it ruins the images I’ve created in my head. Number two-even if the book is amazing, I tend to get bored. So I finished this one but I don’t know if I’ll continue to the third. They are possibly ruined for me. Time will tell.

[Alexw · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh. One of the very few books that I could not stomach to finish. One night he borrows two supposedly clean needles to mainline heroin (evidently his expensive English education never covered AIDS). He has trouble even finding a vein that has not collapsed & then even hitting a good vein. I returned this book to the libraries "DISCARD" bin where it had not been checked out in 5 years.

[Claire Fuller · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I realised that Bad News is about lots (and lots) of drug taking my heart sank. I find reading about someone else's high or low or trip or whatever incredibly boring. Like reading about a character's dream. Yawn. And so I didn't go into Bad News very happily, but St. Aubyn writes so brilliantly, so funnily about the most awful situations that you can't believe could get any worse until they do, that I came to love this book. It is disgusting and horrific, but also absolutely tremendous. Twenty-two year old Patrick flies on Concorde to New York to pick up his fathe

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good God there's a lot of drugs in this book.

I get that the brief adventures of a serious drug addict trying to cope with unspeakable emotion is basically a genre in and of itself, but it's never really been my cup of tea. Since I started this book right after NEVER MIND, I began with a lot of sympathy towards Patrick, who's clearly been traumatized for years by his parents and has never learned any kind of coping mechanisms that don't involve substance abuse. But by the end of this book it was getting hard to feel any kind of sympathy for him.

Patrick's detachment is almost complete, his addiction is unspeakably deep. There is virtually nothing else in the book besides his addiction. It was tolerable because St. Aubyn remains a fantastic writer, making this more visceral than most drug novels, and because I assume this is just one piece of the larger story of Patrick's life in the books to come. At least, I hope so.

[Leo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well written as the first but even more difficult to read. Though but a good read but I can't say I enjoyed or took much out of it

[Nicholas Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very very good and implacably dark book, with what has to be some of the best drug writing ever. If that sounds like dubious praise then feast your fiending synapses on this:

Remembering his drug dealer’s number and the hideous giddiness that dialing it brings about, ‘He hadn’t rung it since September, eight months ago, but he would never forget the bowel-loosening excitement of those seven digits.’

On route to cop drugs a Chinese cabbie tells him,
‘Avenue D bad place.’
‘I’m relying on that,’ said Patrick. ‘Just take me there.’

Even when high he’s excruciatingly conscious of all the false promise of his drug use. About his youthful acid gateway days: ‘He had thought LSD would reveal to him something other than the tyranny of its own effects on his consciousness.’

The ‘arctic landscape of pure terror’ that cocaine ultimately brings on is ‘the price he had to pay for the first heartbreaking wave of pleasure when consciousness seemed to burst out, like white blossoms, along the branches of every nerve. And all his scattered thoughts came rushing together, like the loose iron filings as a magnet is held over them and draws them into the shape of a rose.’

More corrupt love for his insidious heroin, ‘It landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on a favorite cushion'. Even a simple taste of wine is likened to, ‘sensations long wrapped in a bottle now unfurled like a stolen canvas.’ (with bonus echoes of The Goldfinch)

Like pinpricks of pleasure there are a multitude of eloquent bits about the rush of seemingly perceived insights that a drug gifts you with (all of which prove to be shamingly bs of course) - with a high-on-heroin-Patrick ‘struggling against a flood of promiscuous lucidity’

When Patrick buys six quaaludes he quickly adds, ‘and maybe some speed. This was what they called impulse shopping. Speed was the last thing he wanted, but he didn’t like to buy a drug unless he had the capacity to contradict it.’

His chemical dependency is laced with a literary sensibility throughout e.g. on mixing quaaludes with booze, ‘The alcohol brought out the best in them, like the sun coaxing open the petals of a flower.’

And through all of his debauchery he remains prolifically misanthropic and indefatigably cynical, thanking god for his dead father so that he has a reason for looking so awful, voicing his disgust with happy families for their ‘mutual encouragement, demonstrative affection, and the impression they gave of valuing each other more than other people.’

Alright I’ll pull the plug on the quoting now, for in truth the whole volume is an acerbically astute quote in and of itself, as we follow Patrick Melrose in the surly throes of his addiction, treated to all manner of bilious thoughts and vilely violent fantasies along the way.

(And after all of this lavish praise, the next book in the series was a dud for me. Go figure.)

[Brett · Rating 2 out of 5]

You know what's more boring to someone than telling them about your dreams? Telling a recovered addict about the details of one of your binges. OK I get it - St Aubyn either was one or knows one - it was pretty decent detail though you can never really write down all the shit going on in someone's head who's shooting for the line just short of OD but It's as good as I've seen...but still, where was the clever Britcasm of the first novel...at least it was short. On to the next one. And again, retrieving your fathers ashes from New York, scoring and shooting drugs and getting on a plane home does not a novel make.

[Ben Loory · Rating 4 out of 5]

the first book was building the cannon; this book is the guy getting shot out of the cannon with forty thousand syringes stuck into him.

[Phrynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is book two in a series and it is not as appealing as book one although it is just as well written and occasionally quite funny. The main character, Patrick Melrose has grown up to be a serious drug addict and much of the book is about his addiction in great detail. I know a lot more about drug taking now than I have ever needed or wanted to know. However it is obviously just a stage in Patrick's life and I expect we will see him as a recovered addict in the next book. I plan on starting it right away - I need to know what happens next!

[Joy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Beğenmedim. Yani tüm pisliğine, loserslığına, tüm başarısızlığına travmasını yüklemiş. Yaptığının da farkında aslında.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the first Patrick Melrose novel, Never Mind, it was overwhelmingly evident that poor abused Patrick was not going to have a happy life. ‘Bad News’ confirms this with a vengeance. It takes the reader to 1982 and follows Patrick to New York, where he picks up his father’s ashes and goes on a drug binge that he is lucky to survive. Between doses of coke, smack, etc, Patrick attempts small talk with miscellaneous family friends and acquaintances. These interactions are the best part of the book, as St Aubyn has an incredible talent for evoking social nuance. Whilst mouthing platitudes about his father, the acquaintances studiously ignore the evidence that Patrick is a physical wreck, drug addict, and abuse victim. An exemplary incidence of this occurs in this exchange between Patrick and a certain Mr. Banks:

“I don’t think that people noo so much about how to bring up kids in those days. A lot of parents in your fawther’s generation just didn’t know how to express their love.”

“Cruelty is the opposite of love,” said Patrick, “not just some inarticulate version of it.”

‘Bad News’ is as viciously well-written as Never Mind and Patrick’s spiral of self-destruction is painful to read. I was reminded somewhat of The Goldfinch, although Patrick’s substance abuse seems more extreme and hopeless. Theo Decker at least had friends to reach out to, whereas Patrick appears unmoored and alienated from everyone who isn’t actively selling him drugs. If I hadn’t known that there were several more novels in Patrick Melrose series, I would have expected him to be dead of an overdose before the end of this book.

[youmnaa teleb · Rating 3 out of 5]

"لكن في الأساس كل الحلول مؤقّتة، حتى الموت.."

الجزء الثاني من خماسية باتريك..تبدأ أحداث الرواية بنبأ مشؤوم يضطر باتريك للسفر إلى نيويورك والذي أصبح في العشرينيات من عمره.. نتعرف فيها عن طبيعة حياته وعن أفكاره وفلسفته في الحياة
وكما نرى التغيرات التي ظهرت عليه نتيجة زرع والده بعض الأفكار في عقله، كما أنه أعطاه بعض النصائح لتكملة حياته وتحسينها مثل "راقب كل شئ" " لا تثق بأحد" "إياك أن تعتذر، إياك أن تب��ر" أو كما أقول أنا كي تدمره وتحطمه..
متى يُدرك المرء أنه تحت تأثير شخص آخر ويجب التوقف؟

الرواية لا تخلو من الحوارات العميقة ومن أكثر الحوارات التي أعجبتني حوار "باتريك" مع "نانسي" حول أسلوب تربية الأطفال وعدم معرفة الآباء كيفية التعبير عن حبهم لأطفالهم.
"إنَّ القسوة هي نقيض الحب، وليست مجرد نسخة غير مُعبَّر عنها عنه"

[Fraser Simons · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another short and unsweet instalment. We see Patrick as a young man, basically only engaging in escapism as his father passes and he must collect the ashes. Unable to process, most of it is in a drug induced fugue state that illustrates that Patrick is Not Okay, he has some of the worst qualities of his father, and he hasn’t dealt with anything from the past. Possibly the abuse shown in book one continued a great deal more too, it’s eluded to.

Still well written, but it can really only make one point and it does so quite a lot.

[Alex Sarll]

I was only cautiously enthusiastic about the first Patrick Melrose novel - but with the second, I begin to see what St Aubyn is up to. Previously, we met Patrick as a shy, tormented five-year-old; now he's 22 and, not to put too fine a point on it, a total wanker - a selfish, self-pitying specimen, constantly taking one drug to balance out the other drug of which he just took too much while trying to take the edge off...and so forth. Which means that an awful lot of this book features St Aubyn's crystal prose applied to syringes, something of a sticking point (no pun intended) for me. But the beauty of it is that we've missed out all those crucial years you'd get in a typical bildungsroman, yet we can still see how the child is the father to the man - and more than that, how the dreadful father is father to the man. In a sense the structure reminds me of comics, static panels where the action is happening unseen in the gutter between them. I'm now looking forward very much to the third book - I just need a break from all the syringes and self-pity before I attempt it.

[Tülay Tellioğlu · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5
İlk kitabın yorumunda yazarın çok dağınık bir anlatımı olduğundan diyaloglardan ziyade karakterlerin iç konuşmalarına yer verdiğinden bahsetmiştim. Aynı anlatım şekli bu kitapta da mevcuttu ve çoğu zaman okurken canımın sıkılmasına sebep oldu. Yine de çocukken babası tarafından ağır bir travmaya maruz kalan Patrick’in genç halini ve genç halinin iç konuşmalarını merakla okudum. Az önce bahsettiğim travmadan dolayı olsa gerek ağır bir uyuşturucu bağımlısı ile karşılaştım ve açıkçası pek de şaşırmadım. Ölen babasının naaşını almak için New York’a gelen Patrick uzun zamandır uzak kaldığı kişilere, akrabalara tekrar maruz kalınca iyice dibe vuruyor. Olayın devamının nasıl ilerleyeceğini aşırı merak etsem de yazarın dili beni çok zorluyor. Şimdilik elimde üçüncü kitabı da olduğu için onu da okurum diye düşünüyorum. Fakat dördüncü ve beşinci kitabı için para verip satın alır mıyım hiç emin değilim.🤷🏽‍♀️

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Everything was under control.

No, he mustn't think about it, or indeed about anything, and especially not about heroin, because heroin was the only thing that stopped him scampering around in a hamster's wheel of unanswerable questions. Heroin was the cavalry. Heroin was the missing chair leg, made with such precision that matched every splinter of the break. Heroin landed purring at the base of his skull, and wrapped itself darkly around his nervous system, like a black cat curling up on its favorite cushion. It was as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm.

The way other people felt about love, he felt about heroin, and he felt about love the way other people felt about heroin: that it was a dangerous and incomprehensible waste of time."

This was very nearly a five star book for me. The phrase "tour de force" comes to mind, except that phrase has such positive connotations, and being in the head of Patrick Melrose is in no way a positive experience, excepting the dark pleasure of his (and of course the author's) self-loathing cleverness.

Bad News follows Patrick over the course of three days, when he travels to New York to retrieve his father's ashes. The old man has died unexpectedly, and everyone assumes Patrick should be in mourning, but he knows this is a turning point, a chance for freedom. Patrick's father abused him in every way a person can abuse another, for years, and nobody every did anything about it. The most striking phrase from the first books was, "Nobody should do that to anybody else." Here, it was Patrick upon learning his father has died, thinking, "I've got to get this right." (Paraphrasing here because my copy is not with me while I'm writing this.)

The death of Patrick's father is the inciting event here, but it's not the center of the book. Rather, it is, but it's an absent center. Patrick's father in life or death is an invisible coat that Patrick wears around with him constantly, and his presence is constantly felt around the edges of everything Patrick does, acknowledged or not.

But the real center is Patrick and his relationship to drugs. Basically all of them. He is one of the worst addicts I've ever heard of, and honestly I don't know how he's not already dead. He spends the entire book high out of his mind off cocaine, alcohol, Quaaludes, or heroin. Sometimes chasing one with another. Sometimes many at once. Patrick Melrose is a man who never wants to be alone with his thoughts, he seeks the oblivion of pleasure, or pain. His abusive childhood fucked him over real good, such that drugs are the most pleasurable thing in his life.

Patrick is not likable at all, and yet I felt for him. He's self-loathing, and that loathing extends to the rest of the population. He is an indiscriminate misanthropist. He was brought up in a world that either refused to see the abuses he suffered, or that was unable to see it entirely, because the things the upper classes value have no actual value, and in fact do actual harm. And nothing in his life has given him the tools, so far, to escape the prison of his mind, or the world as it was presented to him.

It's tragic, and gross, and I couldn't look away. The book is relatively short at only 166 pages, and it flew by. I'm not usually the type of person to like reading about, well, pretty much anything this book is about. But something about it captured me anyway. Patrick is a living reminder of the damage human beings can do to one another. And of course, it probably helps that St. Aubyn is a great writer. He has a gift for imagery, and a sense of pacing and timing that makes it look easy. He'll go off on some flowery over the top tangent, and then finish it up with something totally non-sequitur, effectively pulling his own release valve, and keeping you turning the pages. The autobiographical nature of the book probably has something to do with that. This is a raw book, and it feels like something the author knows intimately.

I did watch the TV adaptation with Benedict Cumberbatch before I read the books, so maybe that is further helping my affection for the terrible Patrick. I found it interesting to read the book after seeing the show, the way the show externalized Patrick's internal struggles, and translated his erudite hallucinations, his clever downward spiral, into a visual medium. It's really a quite faithful adaptation.

One thing about this book is that by the end, you don't see a way out for him. He's in the middle of the shit, and he's not getting out any time soon. Whereas in the show, the episode ends with the implication that Patrick has finally had enough, and wishes to crawl out of the hole he's dug for himself. I can't decide which version I like better.

In the end, not giving this five stars because the second half, Patrick's spiral got to be too much for me and my delicate feelings, and as he declined, his cleverness went with him. The latter half of the book was more frantic, desperate, and he was more unlikable. It's really rather remarkable writing, but it was sad and bleak, which are not my favorite things. So, four stars.

[Cynthia Dunn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harrowing.

[Daniel Myatt · Rating 3 out of 5]

A tale of excess, well written but very boring!