<i>Patrick Melrose</i> Is a Lacerating Tour de Force
The new Showtime adaptation of Edward St. Aubyn’s novels stars Benedict Cumberbatch as an Englishman ravaged by trauma.
The genius of Edward St. Aubyn’s five Patrick Melrose novels is in how relentlessly they amalgamate horror and beauty. The loosely autobiographical series—once named the Melrosiad by a reviewer—depicts child sexual abuse, drug addiction, alcoholism, and a smorgasbord of emotional torture, but does so in such entrancing prose that it insulates the reader from the unbearable. Heroin, in St. Aubyn’s writing, is “as soft and rich as the throat of a wood pigeon, or the splash of sealing wax onto a page, or a handful of gems slipping from palm to palm.” The failure of a love affair is when “the jeweled daggers that used to pierce one’s heart are replaced by ever-blunter
