Clever wordplay skewers modern manners and obsessions
British author Edward St Aubyn pokes fun at modern society in his latest novel, his eighth, writes Bron Sibree
Lost for Words
by Edward St Aubyn
Picador
4.5 stars
If there's anything Edward St Aubyn's eighth novel is not, it is lost for words. The work dazzles with its verbal dexterity and, it must be said, toys wickedly, cleverly, with the notion that words can be made to do anything, but in the end can amount to nothing.
But then which novel written by St Aubyn, author of the superb Melrose series, hasn't elicited delight and wonder with its verbal virtuosity? Hailed as Britain's greatest living prose stylist, he can do almost anything with words. As The Spectator once said of his writing, "he takes us to the very limits of the expressible".
But a word of caution for Melrose fans. Lost for Words is a world, indeed an entire emotional register, away from the quintet of novels about St Aubyn's alter ego, Patrick Melrose, and his dysfunctional aristocratic family. An ambitious and ultimately transformative literary project about reconstructing a life, an identity after psychological annihilation, these novels are among the most lavishly praised literary works of the past decade, with Mother's Milk, the fourth in the series, winning the prestigious 2007 Prix Femina Etranger after making the shortlist of the Man Booker Prize in 2006.
However, while the Melrose novels are awash with irony, wit and comedic flair on the surface, they revolve around an achingly tragic core. Lost for Words instead cavorts recklessly between satire, comedy and farce as it sends up our obsession with literary prizes in general, and the Man Booker in particular. Along the way it also has a mischievous dig at just about every preoccupation in our contemporary consumer-driven society.
The novel cavorts recklessly between satire, comedy and farce as it sends up our obsession with literary prizes
It begins with Malcolm Craig, an obscure opposition MP, reflecting on his very real but altogether fleeting doubts over accepting the chairmanship of the committee for the Elysian Prize for literature. First of all he resents, even loathes, Sir David Hampshire, the "cold war relic" who has not only selected him as chair but appointed the entire committee. Then there are his misgivings about the sponsor of the prize, the Elysian Group, on whose board Sir David maintains a position. A key producer of some of the world's most radical herbicides and pesticides, Elysian was also a global leader in the field of genetically modified crops whose shortcomings had come to the fore after "some regrettable suicides" among Indian farmers whose crops had failed when they were sold wheat designed for colder climes.