Freudian slip

At Last is the fifth — and, it’s pretty safe to say, most eagerly awaited — of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels.

At Last is the fifth — and, it’s pretty safe to say, most eagerly awaited — of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels. The first three, now called the Some Hope trilogy, took Patrick from an upper-class childhood where he was raped by his father from the age of five, through his understandably drug-addicted youth and on to the nervous beginnings of recovery at 30. Somehow, though, the result was a joy to read: full of dazzling phrase-making, terrific black comedy and stirringly vicious satire on the ghastly inhabitants of Patrick’s privileged world.

Not that this was widely noticed at the time — because when they came out in the 1990s the books earned what’s euphemistically known as ‘a cult following’. But then in 2006 came the unignorably brilliant Mother’s Milk, which reintroduced Patrick in middle age as a disappointed and increasingly drunken husband and father.