Double Blind by Edward St Aubyn
In this latest work by the author of the Patrick Melrose novels, the characters are interesting but strange, and the story ends on a somewhat unresolved note. The real joy of this book is the author’s acrobatic fluency with language. With playful ease, he captures complex contemporary ideas in a few fresh and often paradoxical words.
Channeling Jane Austen, Edward St Aubyn says that in the academic world, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that any topic in search of a reputation for seriousness must be in want of neuroimaging.” In this story, deeply flawed scientific entrepreneurs discuss complex ideas about how to make money from scientific discoveries about life and consciousness while tripped out on drugs.
In New York, Lucy gives up her job and her almost fiance to return to London and work for a hyper-rich hyper-intelligent, and hyperactive businessman appropriately called Hunter.
Only to find herself getting seizures on the plane. Once in London, she is fortunately able to reunite with her scientific friend Olivia, the adopted daughter of two psychiatrists. This friend is a great support when Lucy receives a devastating medical diagnosis.
Meanwhile, the previously unattached Olivia has fallen for Francis, who’s deeply ensconced in Sussex, overseeing a rewilding experiment. Before too long, Francis has more to think about as he carries on with his work of counting nightingales and observing insects — he finds himself brooding over his impending fatherhood.
The witty dialogue is a sheer joy to read. ‘“Science is a subset of human nature and not the other way around,”’ says Hunter to Olivia’s father. The shrink responds by raising the subject of how badly mental patients used to be treated. In this context, he recalls one patient who commented after a psychiatrist had him recommitted on the basis of his claim to have nails in his feet that “Some of these doctors don’t seem to have heard of a metaphor.”’
Olivia’s father has begun to psychoanalyze a new schizophrenic patient. “‘I’m on my meds,’” Sebastian announces on arriving in the doctor’s office, adding “‘I might try lying down on the couch. That’s what they do in films, isn’t it? It might feel more real.’”
Meanwhile, Hunter has managed to persuade Father Guido, a naive abbott at the Vatican, to allow him to scan the brain of a deeply spiritual monk who has been silent for thirty years. But Guido’s Cardinal is angered by the thought that the church might miss out on a share of any profit the serene monk’s brainwaves may generate. Accordingly he sends the abbott to the south of France to bribe and blackmail the entrepreneurs into cutting a financial deal with the Vatican.
On his initial foray into the wider world, Father Guido must first overcome his fear of flying, at which he is also a novice. At a party where the business people are mingling, he inadvertently drinks margaritas, takes ecstasy and dances. When he finally get to sleep, he judges that the hotel bed makes “his simple pallet in the monastery seem like a bed of nails on which an ostentatious yogi might show off his indifference to circumstance.”
The serious nature of Lucy’s illness brings out a kinder, gentler side of her new employer. She finds Hunter’s suspect charm “replaced by kindness” and discovers that “his professional audacity turned out to be an extension of moral courage, rather than a substitute for it.” Surprisingly, he envelops her “in a protection that not only made her feel safe, but left her free to feel unsafe.”
Hope, a liberal ranch owner in California, makes a play for Francis. A virtue signaller extraordinaire, she explains that her family made “a fortune in pretzels,” and she’s “laundering the money with philanthropy.” Her neighbour, also a rancher, is “a self-mocking Republican with a white moustache.” The two are “old antagonists in the uncivil war between liberal and conservative values that play out even at this high altitude of American society.” Fortunately, “the basic solidarity of being rich” means they can still have lunch together. Their antipathy is “more like an unattended jousting tournament than a primetime wrestling match, beloved by millions.”
Hilariously, St Aubyn uses the voice of the Republican rancher to comment on the current zeitgeist. ‘“I don’t know when arrested development became a virtue,”’ says Jim, ‘“around the same time as greed and grievance and self-pity, I guess,”’ adding that while people used to want to get rid of resentment, they now “water it and put it on a windowsill, like a favourite pot plant.”
Francis too is touched by cynicism: ‘“Poets, once the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world,’ were now the acknowledged casualties of literature” and politicians seem to be “recruited from the locked wards of psychiatric hospitals.”’ Even protestors are not what they used to be, growing “more strident and desperate" as they vie for attention with the better-funded organizations they are protesting against.”
At a second party hosted by Hunter in Nice, schizophrenic Sebastian serves canapes to a red-robed Monseigneur and an art expert, who are discussing “whether, in an age of terrorism, a priest needs to have bullet-proof clothing.” The Monseigneur, “obviously a bit of a shopaholic,” is excited to hear his interlocutor’s description of the new ceramic armour, which “can be interwoven with silk or any other fabric.”
While they talk about clothes, Sebastian — much improved after his psychiatric sessions, but still far from well well — thinks his own dark thoughts. Hospitals, he decides, “are really for looking after germs,” making sure “they learn how to survive all the antibiotics known to man.”
Hoping for some time on his own to sort out his confused thoughts and desires, Francis leaves the party to relax in an empty room. Unfortunately, he is followed by a “connoisseur,” who begins to lecture him on the history and decor of the chamber they’re in. When Francis expresses his wish to be alone, the other man raises an eyebrow slightly, as if to indicate that he “in his time had he had been no stranger to fierce emotion, but that unlike lesser mortals, he had stamped on that spitting cobra long ago.”