A Clue to the Exit

June 15, 2015
Linguistic legerdemain enlivens this short, sharp, often funny, occasionally moving novel about a British screenwriter who, when told he has six months to live, sets about writing a novel. Best known for the movie Aliens with a Human Heart, Charlie finds himself in his final days alienated from his ex-wife (who keeps their London house even though her spiritual home is Tibet), his New York agent, and his friends. Moreover, throughout his travels, he is too restless to stay in his house in St. Tropez, or a luxury Monte Carlo hotel, or Toulon’s red light district, or the desert, holding fast to two obsessions: longing to reconnect with his daughter and a determination to write something important. Interspersed with Charlie’s personal narrative are excerpts from his novel, a third-person description of people meeting on a train after a conference on consciousness. Cross-references abound: the hero of Charlie’s novel is named Patrick (a nod to St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose series), fellow travellers Crystal and Peter (in the novel within the novel) appeared in St. Aubyn’s novel, On the Edge, and Charlie’s novel’s tentative title is On the Train. Both novels provide laugh-out-loud moments, as St. Aubyn remains the preeminent satirist of a meaningless New Age search for meaning. What makes this effort compelling is Charlie’s painfully honest, unremittingly self-aware account of his emotional journey, drawing readers down with him into a “narrowing funnel of time.”

June 1, 2015
If you can see the end coming from a long way off, do you rush toward it or head in the opposite direction? Therein lies a question to be wrestled with-and so St. Aubyn (On the Edge, 2014, etc.) does. Charlie Fairburn, the screenwriter of such immortal flicks as Aliens with a Human Heart ("perhaps you were one of the fifty-three million people who paid to see it"), has six months to live. Does he head out to sail around the world, climb great peaks, see the most important museums in the most beautiful cities? Nope. Now that he's put aside the possibility of killing himself for a minute or two, Charlie nurses ambitions that are somewhat less involved: he decides he's going to write the novel he dreamed about when he was young, explore the ideas that captivated him in college. Never mind that his agent will go ballistic: there are ways of working around Arnie Cornfield, whose name and manner are cliches as much as are his words, even if St. Aubyn doesn't quite have American English, and especially Hollywood American English, down. ("The audience have gotta leave the movie with a smile on their faces," he writes, Britishly.) Prozac and potage in tummy, Charlie sets to work, penning a yarn that reeks of Waiting for Godot and undergraduate courses in the nature of consciousness and suchlike things: "She hardly recognized the argumentative intellectual she had driven to psychedelic insanity in the Utah desert five years ago, the man who declared the 'scandal' of pure Being, and 'announced the death of Nature.' " Charlie's slim novel is and will always be an acquired taste, but it makes a nice distraction while he's waiting for the end. But did someone say deus ex machina? St. Aubyn turns in a curious confection, well-crafted as always but rather insubstantial for all its philosophical explorations; it's certainly more cheerful than his Melrose novels (At Last, 2012, etc.), but even though it's still brimming with mordant humor and venom (and, for that matter, plenty of inside jokes to please faithful readers), it seems a detour from the weightier, psychologically richer stuff of old. Though with plenty of good moments, this ranks as lesser work by an author who's done much better.

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August 1, 2015
Screenwriter Charlie Fairburn is dying of cirrhosis and has six months to live. He determines to write a novel, something honest and complete, before he dies and chooses consciousness as his subject. He's on, then off Prozac. He sells his house in St. Tropez and goes to Monte Carlo to gamble all the money away. He meets Angelique and offers her a million francs a day to lose his money for him, but their passionate affair ends when the money is gone. Charlie moves on to a seedy hotel in Toulon, then to a nearby island, where he is awed by the beauty of nature, and then to the Sahara. His novel, which adds another layer of narrative, takes place on a train and features three characters (familiar from earlier St. Aubyn novels) who are returning to London from a consciousness conference in Oxford and spend their time engaged in the great consciousness debate. Mordant, moving, shot through with incandescent prose, the latest of St. Aubyn's novels made available in the U.S. (it was published in Britain in 2000) is a must for fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2015

How would you choose to end your days if, like Charlie Fairburn, a successful screenwriter with advanced cirrhosis of the liver, you were given six months to live? Up until now, Charlie has led the life of a bon vivant, lubricated with alcohol and swanning around luxury hotels accompanied by beautiful women. Now he believes he needs to strip down to the essentials to write a novel and leave behind something of value. To accomplish this, he heads to Monte Carlo, intending to gamble away his fortune. There, he finds the alluring Angelique, who is only too eager to take Charlie's money in exchange for some mutually satisfying sex. Angelique also enables him to get started on his novel, a talky meditation on consciousness, which helps him deal with the predictable mood swings from euphoria to melancholy to grudging acceptance of his fate. VERDICT Highly regarded for his "Patrick Melrose" novels, St. Aubyn delivers memorable characters, dark humor, and sublime writing in this stand-alone effort. [See Prepub Alert, 3/9/15.]--Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2015

St. Aubyn triumphed when Mother's Milk, one of his Patrick Melrose novels, was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2006. He's since swept this country, with more than 100,000 copies of the five Melrose novels now available across formats. This work, the last of St. Aubyn's novels to be published here, features successful screenwriter and not-so-successful family man Charlie Fairburn, who's given six months to live. He's thrown himself into writing a novel about death while deciding to risk half his fortune at a casino, though the setting is a train, where characters from previous St. Aubyn works join the protagonists to discuss the nature of consciousness.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.