The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk [Deckle Edge] [Paperback]

“Never Mind” introduces Patrick as a young child raised by his pitiful mother, Eleanor, and oppressive father, David. As a demonstration of his power over Eleanor, David makes his wife crawl on her knees to eat figs from the patio that have dropped from an overhangin tree after she’d complained that they were being wasted. Money for their beautiful home located in the south of France comes from Eleanor’s inheritance. They are part of the wealthy British with little to do all day but wonder what they are going to do with their day. David’s ennui and cruelty finds targets in both his wife and son. With his friend and philosophical scholar, David complains about everyone else in the world while being positively horrid himself.
“Bad News” sees Patrick as a 22-year-old living in London and flying by Concord to New York to collect the remains of his father. He harbours only hatred for the man who abused him both emotionally and sexually as a child and suffers a similar disconnection to his environment. He’s a modern Holden Caufield with a drug problem going from one fix to the next searching for the perfect combination of uppers and downers while attempting to cope with the hatred he feels toward his father and his sense of loss.
In “Some Hope,” Patrick attends a party of aristocrats whose number includes Princess Margaret. Somehow, Patrick and his best friend and drug-addled companion have kicked their drug habits, Patrick to pursue a law degree at Oxford and Johnny, a career in child psychology. How they were able to kick a habit that should have killed them is never revealed. The party is hosted by Bridget, Nicholas’s girlfriend from the first novel, and her husband, Sonny who’s very wealth and a minor aristocrat. Bridget’s given birth to a daughter however she’s been unable to provide a son and heir for her husband. As a consequence,Sony’s turned to supermodel, Cindy, as a potential breeder and future soul mate. All participants at the party are equally nasty seizing any opportunity to prove their cleverness by humiliating others.
“Mother’s Milk” is the final Patrick Melrose novella in this compellation. Somehow Patrick is married with two boys, Thomas who’s a newborn at the beginning of the novel and Robert, a precocious five-year-old. Patrick’s mother Eleanor now lives in a seniors’ home after suffering a debilitating stroke after she's left all her property to a New Age sham of a shaman by the name of Seamus. After being abandoned by his mother and the object of his father’s sexual abuse as a child, Patrick now must cope the loss of his inheritance and the emotional withdrawal of May, his wife who now spends all her time with Thomas who not only consumes all her energy during the day but also sleeps with her at night. He turns to an old fling for temporary solace however no easy solutions to problems are ever available for the namesake of these novels.
The Patrick Melrose novels are brilliantly written depicting the incredibly abusive relationships of people with the time and energy required to make their lives incredibly complicated and in Patrick’s case, incredibly unhappy. Black humour at its darkest.