A Clue to the Exit

by Edward St. Aubyn

Charlie Fairburn, successful screenwriter of Aliens with a Human Heart , ex-husband and absent father, has been given six months to live. He resolves to stake half his fortune on a couple of turns of the roulette wheel and, to his agent's disgust, to write a novel - about death. Set on a train, it involves a group of characters locked in a debate about the nature of consciousness. As the train gets stuck at Didcot Junction, Charlie becomes more passionately entangled with the dangerous young woman who is his nemesis.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Novels, Contemporary

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

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

[Proustitute (on hiatus) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Monet said he wanted to paint the air, a task not unlike writing about consciousness, the medium for seeing which can’t itself be seen. I have failed to paint the air or to write about consciousness, but it’s enough to know that there are states of mind and works of art which deliver this paradox: that the thing which is closest to us is the most mysterious."

[Antonomasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novella which lacks the finesse of the Patrick Melrose series, but it's Edward St Aubyn so I love it anyway.

Charles, a decadent screenwriter - successful but probably not quite as good as he thinks he is - is diagnosed with terminal cancer, sells his house and sets off to Monte Carlo to blow the proceeds in casinos, whilst also writing his first and last novel.

I suspect this of being a daydream or fantasy written down: the tone can be slightly off, slightly purple-prosed in in the way of such things. (At least after the toe-wrigglingly brilliant first chapter that made me wish more than ever that I could talk to the person who wrote this.)
As ever, the author's deep irony and sense of human ridiculousness mock and refract the other ideas present, and prevent his themes from being forever teenagely-earnest, or maybe just very Continental in their seriousness, as they would in another's hand: the Huysmans influences, the sense of grand romantic tragedy, the psychotherapeutic understanding of self and others, the reflections on the science of consciousness (some of which remain pertinent, some already outdated), the attraction to the slightly mystical whilst being too well-informed and too naturally sceptical to go all-out woo.

'Excerpts' from Charles' novel satirise Patrick Melrose, alongside characters from On The Edge, which I haven't read; there are some worthwhile insights, and evident rehearsal for some of the philosophical discussions in books 4 and 5 of the Melrose series, but these paragraphs are often unnecessary intermissions, and the material about consciousness never quite gels with the rest of the book. Setting this and Lost for Words and its parody novels against Melrose, it appears St Aubyn writes better with complete focus on one milieu.

A Clue to the Exit is obviously not StA at his best, but still enjoyable for the dedicated fan who loves all his pet topics and attitudes. Those who've had more reservations about his other books will have even more about this one - and it's definitely not the best novel to start with if you've never read him before.

April 2015.

[carelessdestiny · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn't take to this pretentious exercise. It's as if he was trying so hard to be funny that all the characters and situation were distorted into a facetious and silly world of their own, bearing little relation to any experience.

[Dayna · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am noticing a pattern with his books. Patrick Melrose novels - love, couldn't put down. Everything else so far (3 other novels) -eh.

[Marcus Hobson · Rating 3 out of 5]

By having your central character as a writer, albeit a sometime scriptwriter who wants to write a book, allows the author to pass judgement on all manner of things within the world of writing and publishing. He can parody the role of the agent, for example.

While I enjoyed this book, I did come away feeling that this had just been a way for St Aubyn to show off how clever he is, while at the same time poking fun at the world in which he makes a living. This book fits into his work just after the first three novels of the five in the Patrick Melrose series of semi-autobiographical works.

In ‘A Clue to the Exit’ Charlie Fairburn, a successful screenwriter, has been given just six months to live. He makes two decisions; to lose all his money in the casino and to write a novel about death and consciousness.
I think we can sum up many of the problems with this quote:
“Instead of wondering whether he would live long enough to see science crack the code, he could now legitimately turn his back on the entire question. His life had been spent trying to stop thinking about one thing or another – sex, drugs, cruelty, snobbery, money. Consciousness just happened to be today’s relatively abstruse nightmare, the thing he couldn’t get off his mind, and McGinn’s analysis was the Betty Ford clinic he had been crying out for, a refuge for those who had been engaged in the compulsive futility of trying to find a common language with which to negotiate between the dictatorship pf science and the anarchist guerrillas of introspection.”
Charlie takes half of all his money to the casino and cashes it into a handful of chips, making it possible for him to lose everything quickly. However, one of his bets winning was not in the plan, and he now finds himself with countless more money than he had before. The solution, to give most of the money to a woman addicted to gambling and watch her lose it, while at the same time writing his novel in the casino restaurant. The name of the character in his novel is Patrick, although not Patrick Melrose. It would be fair to say he has similar problems and issues.
“Sometimes I am delighted by things being as they are, sometimes by their resemblance to something else. Sometimes understanding how things work weakens my desire for metaphor, sometimes the desire is sharpened by understanding how things work.”

Let me leave you with one further example of the pretentious style:
“At first I thought it was death, then consciousness: now I’m not sure it isn’t time that really fascinates me. (I read somewhere that the deep etymology of ‘fascination’ is the Hittite – always useful when there’s a gap in the archaeological record – word for vagina.) In any case they all seem tantalizingly related to one another. Identity is in there too, disappearing. There’s something that keeps changing shape but remains the same. Ways of putting it dance before me in a nervous congregation, like a cloud of gnats at sunset, made visible by the dying light, the reddening sky.”
I think I’ll settle on pretentious twaddle for my summary.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Until roughly the last 5% of this novel, St. Aubyn had me (once again) firmly in his delicious grip. I was sailing through, often flying. It was great. (There's quite a master at work here.)

Then he lost me. More specifically, he set me free and loose in the world of the novel's theme: the inability to understand consciousness.

Up to the novel's near-conclusion, St. Aubyn plays with his theme hilariously. ("'Circumstances beyond our control' is an excellent phrase, thought Patrick. There's hardly a statement that wouldn't be improved by mentioning them. 'Due to circumstances beyond our control it's my birthday today ... Due to circumstances beyond our control we still don't know how consciousness works.'")

There were moments when I started to think that 'A Clue...' was even a lot funnier than the-very-funny 'Lost for Words'. (i.e., "We thrashed like marlin caught on the hooks of each other's unforgiving genitals.") It wasn't exactly like I was comparing the number of jokes in order to come to such a conclusion - but 'A Clue...' is a first-person narrative and that particular command of control was resulting more or less in a certain freewheeling wit.

But I suppose, at some point, the novel's theme 'had to' come front-and-center - which it does, finally, in a short series of very short chapters, which are (apparently) set in the mindset of as-total-as-possible consciousness. To me, the abrupt tonal shift (even if thematically faithful) proved unsatisfactory.

That said...there's still a good 95% that precedes the conclusion. And it's all quite sharp, quite engaging and quite funny.

[Alex Sarll]

Charlie Fairburn, successful screenwriter of heartwarming blockbuster drivel, has six months to live. His plan: to gamble half his fortune away, connect again with his daughter, and write a novel. None of which goes to plan. Most notably, the novel is an absurdly self-regarding affair about consciousness with a lead character named Patrick...

This is, in other words, the satyr-play accompanying the great tragic trilogy of the Patrick Melrose novels. Addressing it in the same way is almost a category error (not that the blurb or cover offer any hint of the difference, of course). For me, the most significant change is the narration, here first-person. Imagine how much less likeable and fascinating Patrick would be if we had his story in any credible approximation of his voice, rather than minutely recounted by an impossibly intimate observer. This despite him obviously being autobiographical - but then Charlie refers here to "writing a third-person narrative which is a flagrantly displaced first-person narrative". Maybe this is footnotes as much as the satyr-play.

[Cathy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pretentious and not funny.

[EshReads · Rating 1 out of 5]

I took seven months to complete this book. Read so many others in between and came back to this. It is one book I just can’t get into. I had no idea what I was reading and didn’t enjoy it at all.

[Gavin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Has many of St Aubyn's distinctive virtues - acute black comedy about every social stratum, characters creatively misspending resources, the sometime delight of being exploited, actual knowledge of modern philosophy - but this time it doesn't gel.

The protagonist, Fairburn, writes a book with Patrick Melrose as a character - which invites us to identify Fairburn with St Aubyn. But it doesn't fit very well; Fairburn's life work is meaningless and saccharine. They are both troubled and self-destructive and possibly redeemed I suppose.

The enframed narrative with Patrick is annoying, and annoyingly this is intentional:

Yesterday Angelique came into the bedroom holding my thin manuscript. She moved towards the open window and I surged up from the pillows shouting, ‘Don’t!’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to throw it out of the window — that would be doing you a favour.’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘It’s wooden and dry and boring. I can’t believe this is what you want to do with your last days. Why don’t you write about how wonderful the figs taste when you know you may never taste one again?’
‘Because they don’t,’ I said, ‘they taste like ash.’
‘Why don’t you tell us how we must live every moment to the full because life is so precious?’
‘Because if it’s dying that makes you realize that, you’re already too anxious to do anything about it. I wanted to do something serious…’
‘You are doing something serious: you’re dying,’ she said, laughing.
‘Something impersonal.’
‘But that’s exactly the problem: you must make it more personal, more human, more dramatic. You should write from your own experience, write about us... I think the real problem is that you don’t know how to make abstract ideas exciting...’
She left the room and, paralysed by failure and confusion, I watched the breeze scatter the pages across the floor.

This is a good skewering of upper-middle-class / academic conceit:

The warden’s sly, pedantic chuckle seemed to reverberate among the bookshops and gargoyles that guarded the taxi rank; his gurgling complacencies soaked the golden buildings until they split open like soggy trifle. Perhaps they had once been intended for something serious, but there had been too many puns, too many Latin tags, too many acrostics, too many fiendish crossword puzzles, too many witty misquotations and too many sly chuckles for them to do anything but rot, however noble and solid they might look to the winking eye of a tourist’s camera.

Many, many different ideas about consciousness show up appear, from the zany (Penrose and Sheldrake) to the canonical (Colin McGinn and Galen Strawson). The stuff on Penrose and Sheldrake is accurate, in the weak sense that it describes their positions correctly. Sadly it's mysterianism that wins over Patrick / Charlie. The conclusion is roughly a celebration of the mere manifest image, quietism, Wittgenstein's gallic shrug. It manages to miss the point of scientific interest in consciousness, and underestimate the progress it's made already:

I saw the latest cluster of books to emerge from the great consciousness debate: Emotional Intelligence, The Feeling Brain, The Heart’s Reasons. I felt the giddy relief of knowing that I wasn’t going to read any of them. The fact that science has decided to include emotion in its majestic worldview seems about as astute as an astronomer discovering the moon.

Oh well. Plenty of cynical goodness besides. For instance, I have felt the following emotion, back when I didn't have the spine to refuse to go clubbing:

I sat down on a velvet bench and through all the smoke and the bad music and the undesirable desire I suddenly allowed myself to become relaxed. Even here there was no need to posture. The essential question remained the same. Where could I find freedom in this situation? I looked around and felt reconciled with all the people in Alessandro's party and all the people in the room. I could spray adjectives at them for the rest of the evening, but in the end they were just people struggling to be happy with only the most unpromising material at their disposal.

[Rioghnat Crotty · Rating 5 out of 5]

The narrator, a bestselling novelist, has recently been told he has only a short time to live. He becomes obsessed with both living his last days in a meaningful way and creating an authentic work on the nature of consciousness. Neither of these desires is easily fulfilled. The expected route of this novel would be that he discovers the simple beauty of his heart and reconciles his fragmented soul with simple basic truths. However, the author does not follow this expected route but instead shows us a man whose impending death does not give him some miraculous clarity, but who remains a splintered and sporadic individual. The writing is of incredible dexterity, many of the lines have the quality of summarising experiences in a deceptively simple but stunningly effective way- a character walks through a bus trying to decide which passenger to sit beside on the basis of 'who is less likely to waken the monster of my intolerance'. I raced through this book, trying to slow down and savour the gems but couldn't help greedily rushing through. St.Aubyn doesn't go for easy answers or neat conclusions, this was the first book of his that I read but I will definitely be reading more of him.

[Bev · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book probably deserves seven stars for its exquisite writing -- some extraordinary "ah-ha" descriptions of places and thoughts -- but I was exhausted by the relentless depth of its philosophical musing. Main character Charles has only months to live and sets out to confront/comprehend "consciousness" before he dies. As well as some extreme experiences (such as giving millions to a beautiful compulsive gambler to lose for him), he explores his obsession through the conversations of characters in the novel he is writing -- a book within a book. St Aubyn is such an original and intelligent writer that he is worth the effort his books require.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the way this complements Patrick Melrose without actually being part of that series. It's such an interesting investigation into writing, consciousness, and St. Aubyn's own life/demons. I thought it was really self-reflexive and the first person narration by character who is also an author gave it a really interesting perspective (not dissimilar to the feeling you get with Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, just with more philosophical debates).

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ho hum. Everything I have read by St Aubyn since the Melrose novels (which I heartily enjoyed) has been well-written, yet inconsequential pap. I had hoped for better with this one, and was only slightly more edified. Sigh, such a waste.

[Rick · Rating 1 out of 5]

Even St. Aubyn's celebrated wit cannot save this novel
from suicide by boredom. His own three descriptions,
taken from one paragraph near the end of the book,
best sum up the reading experience: "merciless clarity,"
planetary solitude," and "mineral melancholy."

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somehow St. Aubyn's books always sound so much more interesting than they ultimately are... 2.5/5

[Aharon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Post-Melrose diminishing returns.

[Julie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Verbose, pretentious, dull.

[Michael Baranowski · Rating 1 out of 5]

The worst sort of literary novel - a knowing, 'look at how clever I am' display that seems tailor-made to impress book critics, but that does absolutely nothing for me.

[Daniel Polansky]

I read this book.

[booksandreads8 · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a great book in the beginning. The writing was nice and the reading was smooth and insightful. But things started changing from the middle of the book. It became tedious to read the book without feeling bore. The novel that the protagonist was written became a burden on the reader.

[Freya Howell · Rating 1 out of 5]

So so bad which is a shame/ surprising because the Patrick Melrose series is so fantastic :((

[Anna Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Probably my least favourite that I've read of St. Aubyn, but still has that dark wit and down-to-earth observations. A book about death and writing, but mostly life.

"My thoughts were all over the place; even my own characters weren't safe."

[Eddie · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5 Stars bc the premise was good but destroyed by poor writing execution.

This started with five stars. After each chapter a star would get erased. By the 5th chapter I was down to one star. The book’s premise had potential. The author writes fantastic sentences and even though this was a 200 Page book it was still too long as it dragged on. If this was longer I would have put it down. I was debating putting the book down even at this short length!

This really should have been a short story but somewhat notable authors don't get paid for short stories - they get paid for books, so they must write a lengthy book to please the publisher. Authors take a short story and extend it into a long boring book which is a waste of time and paper. All his great sentences mixed with a lot of stupid stuff could have been condensed by eliminating the stupid stuff and making a novella instead of a book.

This was like a Hollywood movie that needed a forced subplot to fill 90 minutes of time. The useless subplot was the author writing a book and reading excerpts of his book he was writing (how stupid is that). The filler/substory didn't move the novel forward and his descriptive sentences stopped doing that also (just a forced subplot and filler to create a book out of which should have been a short story or possibly a novella). The publisher said ‘this is too short so fill it in with something.’ Oh okay I'll fill the novel with a novel within a novel of a book about an author and we're going to read also about the book that the author's writing within the book written about the author. You follow? This became stupid, tiresome, and pretentious. I couldn't wait to finish this.

I didn't want to put it down because now I'm going to get to the point where this would have been four books in a row by ‘acclaimed authors’ (2 Nobel Prize winners) that were too long to fill pages to make a ‘book’. I'm now worried that every book I pick up is going to be garbage and I’ll discard and I won’t finish any books. It's a fine line. My prior books (In the Cafe of Lost Youth, Raylan, The Sympathizer) should have been shorter.

Author writes picturesque sentences. But these vivid sentences don’t progress the story or move the book forward. They are pretty sentences for the sake of it. It's like a movie that has nothing but amazing scenery and cinematography that has nothing to do with the story or progressing the story (a movie of scenery that is nice but eventually you aren’t watching a movie but a filmed painting). After a while washing the beautiful scenery you're bored.

So many times I felt like putting this short book down even at its short length. When a short book is too long it's bad. Tired of these ‘acclaimed’ authors turning short stories into ‘books’ that are too long and BORING. Makes me never want to read this author again. Perhaps I will audiobook his most notable book at that may be that. Too many books I want to read that I don't think will suck like this one did. Take a good premise and make it into a diatribe. It’s like Hemingway taking The Old Man of the Sea and making it the length of Anna Karinina.

[Georg · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning is sad and promising. Charlie’s doctor tells him he’s got only six months to live. Charlie doesn’t complain, he does not ask “why me?”, he doesn’t bore us with poetry (“What a wonderful world”). He begins to write a novel. Gambles in the South of France, lives in expensive hotels and employs a charming and (of course) strikingly attractive prostitute, Angelique. Nothing wrong with that. So far.

His thoughts and observations are painfully clear and evil. His best jokes are based on his practical view on his bad (and short) outlook.

For instance regarding his timetable.
“… busy, busy, busy. I just don’t see how I am going to fit dying into my packed schedule:” (p.16)
Or his ex, who is afraid he would not even be good at dying.
“Don’t forget that death is a crucial moment in your spiritual development” (p.11)
Or his realtor who is relieved mo make a “Fortune of war.” (p.21)
And finally his agent who asks him to do an interview with the Movie Channel (“either they can do an obituary piece…”) (p.41)
You get the picture.

But then St Aubyn can’t decide the direction his story is going to take. A little bit sarcasm about rich people in casinos and on yachts, some philosophical debates about consciousness, the freedom of will, Chomsky and “Evo-babble”, suicidal thoughts and a pseudo-poetric/psychedelic dream involving the desert, the meaning of life and the rest.

Too bad. But when it comes to St Aubyn I have still SOME HOPE.

[Helen · Rating 1 out of 5]

When I went to the book club for which I read this book, I listened for awhile, appreciating the conversation and the affection for the author and the novel, but when it was my turn, I blurted, "I hated it. I read it twice in case I missed something, but I hated it."

A few years ago I tried the Patrick Melrose novels on the recommendation of a friend, who actually showed up a my door with a copy of the book, proclaiming, "You have to read this. It's fantastic." Because those words are often the kiss-of-death for me, I waited awhile, but true to form, I tried a few pages and quit. For me, books that are hugely popular with everyone else are immediately suspect for me. I am a book snob.

When the book club selected A Clue to the Exit, I thought, "Wow! Here's my chance to see what I missed by discarding the Melrose books." That didn't happen. I despised the protagonist Charlie, who is facing terminal illness in middle age. He's shallow and mean--completely a victim of his own desire for pleasure. (I realize this says something about me--a kind of Calvinist whose favorite novel is The Scarlet Letter.)

I did enjoy the book-club conversation where some brilliant minds from my school analyzed the comedy in the text and spoke persuasively and sympathetically about Charlie and his way in the world.

[Glen U · Rating 3 out of 5]

This work by Edward St. Aubyn is pretentious, complex, boring, thought provoking, drivel, brilliant and at times very humorous. It is akin to one of Woody Allen's serious-comic films. You don't know if the author wants you to really understand what he is conveying or he's just having a good laugh at your expense. At the time I started reading this novel, I assumed it was a new novel by St. Aubyn. But in reading further, it did not feel as polished as his previous work, "Lost for Words", which was a very entertaining book. As I learned subsequently, this piece was first published in 2000, even preceding his Patrick Melrose novels. It has elements of St. Aubyns wit, his talent for dialogue and certainly showcases his amazing approach to something as esoteric as consciousness. It is a book about a writer writing a piece about death and consciousness. His parallel thoughts between the writer and the writers characters, as they attempt to explain the unexplainable, is both amazing and drudgery. His insights are piercing but at times they are confusing and do not go anywhere. The book comes off as self indulgent but readable. Perhaps just a commercial driven release for the U.S. market, but an interesting attempt at an otherwise impossible topic.

[Val · Rating 4 out of 5]

I decided to read this again so that I could compare it with Evelyn Waugh's "The Loved One". Two of the finest writers of their generations, both with a dark sense of humour, have written novels around a theme of death. Both novels are excellent and both are very much of their time.
This one concerns a writer, mainly of screenplays, who is given six months to live and follows how he spends those final months. While apparently living the high-life, having an affair and spending all his money, he also despairs, gets badgered by his agent and a literary 'friend', misses his young daughter and writes a novel about a writer given six months to live. The novel within a novel is about consciousness; three people debate and try to define it, without success, but each independently reaches the same conclusion. The writer in the framing novel thinks this inner novel is incomplete and has far fewer moments of understanding or clarity, despite visiting a Coelhoesque desert.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first encounter with St. Aubyn, and certainly not the last. Though the interwoven “novel” within the novel felt too cerebral most of the time, I recognize that it served as a counterbalance to the musings of a dying man. I also appreciated how, towards the end, the narrator realizes that it’s possible to simply sidestep the entire debate around consciousness that had so strangely preoccupied him, and that in this ability to circumvent was indeed a “clue to the exit,” a strategy for living in the shadow of mortality. Lots of humor in here (which I understand to be a signature of the author), but even more hard won wisdom.

[Erika · Rating 2 out of 5]

It took me ages to finish this book, first because apparently I'm too poor to appreciate the agony of the protagonist of having too much money to concentrate on his work. It was surprisingly painful to read about how he deliberately wastes his fortune. Secondly, I find it tedious when novelists want to discuss philosophical questions in a non-novelistic manner, that is, endlessly reciting philosophical discussions. The book has its moments, however, and I enjoyed the end in which St Aubyn focused more on the experience of the protagonist. He is one of my favourite authors, but this book about "consciousness" sort of misses its target by focusing on academic jargon.