In the first scene of the first book of Edward St. Aubyn’s celebrated, elegantly horrific Patrick Melrose cycle, Patrick’s father, an evil aristocrat in dressing gown and sunglasses, is drowning ants with a high-pressure garden hose. “His technique was well established,” St. Aubyn writes. “He would let the survivors struggle over the wet stones, and regain their dignity for a while, before bringing the thundering water down on them again. … He then narrowed the jet of water with his thumb to batter more effectively on an ant on whose death he was wholly bent.”
This may seem to be a hammy, campy way to establish the sociopathic malice of a man who, before long, will sodomize his own young son. Yet St. Aubyn’s new novel, Double Blind, reveals a sensitivity to the natural world, the fundamental interconnectedness of living things, and the mysteries of consciousness from the perspective of which a man dousing ants looks as hateful as a Birmingham police officer hosing civil rights protesters. Some might call this an exaggerated or morbid sensitivity. Even so, it yields an ambitious, unusual novel of ideas, the likes of which is itself an endangered species.
Double Blind is also a novel of people. St. Aubyn is better than most at depicting the angel-wrestling mental habits of highly thoughtful people. Olivia, a biologist with a keen interest in epigenetics, is best friends with Lucy, who is diagnosed with brain cancer as the book gathers momentum. When Olivia assumes, with diligence and grace, some of the responsibility for Lucy’s care, we are given a glimpse of friendship’s power to transcend the grim determinism of neurobiology.
These women are involved with diametrically opposed men: Olivia with the gentle, meditative Francis, who supervises the “rewilding” of a Sussex estate, and Lucy with Hunter, the billionaire head of the venture capital firm for which she works. That Francis isn’t merely a modern incarnation of the saint whose name he bears, and that Hunter is allowed to be more than a grotesque, greedy foil to Francis’s saintliness, is a testament to the book’s percipience and generosity. Francis struggles with sexual temptation and with his endlessly questioning nature. Hunter, despite being filthy rich, arrogant, and born for Darwinian competition, is capable of being a loving caretaker. Nature is full of surprises.
To this group, St. Aubyn adds Olivia’s parents, Martin and Lizzie, and one of Martin’s patients, Sebastian, a schizophrenic who, in a twist that makes ample room for St. Aubyn’s nature-versus-nurture speculations, may be Olivia’s long-lost twin. There are also the principals of Hunter’s various deals and projects, which include a series of brain-interfacing helmets that can simulate religious experiences.
Because much of Double Blind is set either at Francis’s lushly described Sussex estate or at Hunter’s retreats in Big Sur and Cap d’Antibes, and because it alternates dense interiority with St. Aubyn’s unfailingly witty dialogue, the book feels like a studiously traditional English country house novel. Its gothic elements (twins, hidden identities, ill-gotten wealth, Promethean ambitions) further establish St. Aubyn’s fidelity to venerable old literary traditions. This works to the novel’s advantage, buttressing its hostility to the modern world. Scientific hubris, philosophical lassitude, and disregard for nature — these, St. Aubyn suggests, are what we mostly have to show for ourselves.
Some recent books about environmental disasters, such as Jenny Offill’s novel Weather or Elisa Gabbert’s essay collection The Unreality of Memory, take as a starting point the narrator’s or author’s neurotic preoccupation with environmental catastrophe. It must be said that St. Aubyn has a more convincing claim on being obsessed, as he carves a path for the reader into the thicket of genetics, neurobiology, and environmental science. His characters, even the often bullying and self-satisfied Hunter, want not only better answers but better questions. Would it be such a triumph, the book asks, to determine how consciousness “works” if we still have no idea how consciousness arose? Why preen ourselves on our ability to tinker with or simulate substances and processes, the creation of which, ex nihilo, will always elude our understanding?
Olivia “had been intrigued by neuroscience for some time,” St. Aubyn writes, “not least because its flamboyant imagery seemed to have usurped DNA’s double helix as the popular emblem of the irresistible power of hard science to penetrate nature’s secrets.” The book evinces a resolute skepticism that any such secret has been unlocked: “Not only was the brain not the mind, but an image of the brain was not the brain.” It is cheering to find a mind as keen as St. Aubyn’s so unimpressed by smug appeals to materialism and determinism. Pop neuroscience is dismissed like so many remaindered airport books:
“There’s a parasite carried by cats, Toxoplasma gondii, which is more prevalent in groups with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia than in control groups. Some people even think that Blake may have written ‘The Tyger’ under the influence of his cat’s toxoplasma.”
“Really?” said Olivia. “It’s amazing there isn’t more visionary poetry, given the number of people who own cats.”
At bottom, Double Blind is about curiosity wedded to skepticism that we will ever fully understand the conditions of our existence. The “rewilding” overseen by Francis is a fecund metaphor for the tendency of new questions, doubts, and revelations to overrun our hopes for a well-manicured cosmos. As he immerses himself “in a world of growing richness,” tallying the “grass snakes, common lizards, toads and slow worms he found hidden under the refugia,” Francis is like a prelapsarian Adam, content to experience the world with attention and awe, not yet foolish enough to think that he could ever understand it.
The pleasures of Double Blind have little to do with its plot, which veers from sleepy to slightly madcap. (A thread in which Hunter bargains with the Vatican over IP rights to a Franciscan monk’s brain scans is squarely in the latter category.) Notwithstanding St. Aubyn’s deserved reputation for fizzing badinage, this novel is at its best when it stays in its characters’ heads. Language, St. Aubyn’s elegant, ornate prose can’t help reminding us, is the tool consciousness uses to examine itself.
Hence we get some beautiful pieces of extended internal monologue. As Lucy furiously contemplates the “replication crisis” plaguing the sciences, she dreams of consigning scientific dogmatism to “the debris of broken theories, of phrenological busts and treatises on phlogiston, and giant pre-Copernican maps painted with lapis lazuli and gold.” As he practices walking meditation, Francis’s restless thoughts pour out in an unbroken 10-page paragraph, like proliferating ivy. His focus widens to ponder the emergence of consciousness, and it narrows to examine the behavior of slow worms, “legless lizards with tiny eyes often mistaken for snakes.” As schizophrenic Sebastian unravels before his therapist, St. Aubyn undertakes his greatest challenge, imaginatively inhabiting faulty cognition to consider how the mind makes meaning. It’s a bravura but unsettling performance.
Double Blind also asks, to modify the title of Thomas Nagel’s famous essay, “What is it like to be a batshit billionaire?” The Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos type is a clever locus for a treatment of the “problem of other minds,” being as alien to many of us as an octopus or a nematode. St. Aubyn resists the temptation to make Hunter a glib caricature of late-capitalist excess, a la similar figures in Joanna Kavenna’s Zed or Gary Shteyngart’s Lake Success. A glimpse into Hunter’s thoughts reveals the Rosebud-like memory of his first quasi-mystical confrontation with physics, as if to say that we all start out as wide-eyed cavemen. The trick, St. Aubyn suggests, is to return ourselves to that inquiring and receptive state.
Stefan Beck is a writer living in Hudson, New York.
