Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #51662 in Books
• Published on: 2007-01-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Waterstone's Books Quarterly
'The mix of well-structured story, waspish wit and extraordinary
style is truly dazzling.'

Charles Spencer, Summer Reading Special, Independent on Sunday
'Mother's Milk is, put simply, brilliant...quite unforgettable.'

Daily Mail
Reminiscent of John Updike and Iris Murdoch by turns...bitingly satirical and unfailingly entertaining.

Customer Reviews

Painfully hilarious
The story is painful; the setting all too familiar and real; writing suffused with irony, metaphors and witticisms - behold Mother's Milk. Hermoine Lee, the chair of the judges of this year's Booker entries, described this book as "wickedly funny." And she would be right.

I began this book with no particular enthusiasm, but a little research on the internet gave me enough background about the author to place the work in its context. And this work centres around one theme - the place of a mother in, and how it pervades into the depth of every aspect of, a simple family.

Patrick Melrose is suffering from a midlife crisis. His wife, Mary, has just given birth to her second son, Thomas, and has become extremely close to him - to the point of sacrificing her sexual, and to some extent, emotional connection with her husband. Patrick, the lawyer, successfully manages to pass on his sarcasm and twisted daggers of wit straight to his precocious first son, Robert, who, by the age of five, becomes a master in impersonating other people.

While St Aubyn takes us through the functioning of this rather functional family, we see each character in relation to their mother, and how it has shaped their past, present, and future. The contrast between self-sacrificing Mary's self-obsessed mother and the betrayed and disappointed Patrick's philanthropist and neglectful mother is incisive. The novel touches among various aspects of contemporary family life, particularly of parenting, marriage, relationships, trust, adultery, and euthanasia.

The novel is described through wide-ranging narratives during four summers of 2000 to 2003. The beauty of St Aubyn's prose lies in his choice of the person through whom he narrates each section. At first, we hear the funny and sometimes deceptively cruel Robert, and his slow transformation into the persona that is his father. Then comes Patrick himself, with his disappointment with his wife, his self-loathing, and the guilt he feels about committing adultery. Third comes Mary, and we see the maternal side to St Aubyn's story. The final summer is rather nondescript, and serves its purpose well.

The lack of any ciches, be it in the plot, the prose, or the characters, came as a welcome relief. The normality of the characters was most striking. One cannot elevate the moral stature of any character; nor would the intelligent reader. If he did, he is missing the author's loud and clear message.

The criticisms of the so-called New Age practices, and of the American lifestyle, particularly in the post 9/11 era, or as Patrick calls it, the 9/12 era, are well-founded, and in a style much reminiscent of Oscar Wilde mercilessly dissecting Victorian hypocrisies in his play, are explored with unabashed saracasm.

This book may not linger on in your mind as a powerful and evocative novel. But, it does have several thought-provoking ideas which merit consideration... If that is not good enough for you, you ought to read this novel for the sheer beauty of St Aubyn's prose.

Style and substance
This is a beautifully written and sharply comic short novel. The main pleasure of reading this novel is St Aubyn's precision with words; there's rarely a wasted sentence, and long winded and pointless descriptions of the environment or the characters that inhabit it are refreshingly absent. He is a prose stylist like John Banville, but the scales tip more to the comic than the tragic with St Aubyn's writing, and as a result the plot and characters seem a bit insubstantial at times. In many ways, overlooking the sex and language, Mother's Milk is a very Edwardian novel in the way it treats these fairly unlikeable upper class English characters--at times dismissive but sympathetic to their plights. The narratives of Robert, Patrick and Mary are crisp, wry and often very funny. Robert's entry to the world in the first section of the book is a sharp and startling introduction to the novel. Whilst it is not a book that will linger long in the mind of the reader, it is nonetheless a rewarding read.

milk and honey
Mother's Milk is the most recent to date of St Aubyn's books centred on the family he has written about before. Shortlisted for 2006's Booker Prize, the story sees Patrick, lawyer and husband, juggling his love for his two new sons with his alarm at his wife Mary's distance now that she sees herself as a mother and not a wife. Mary is besotted with sons Robert and Thomas and weary from the demands of motherhood. Also on the scene are Patrick's mother, who is determined to seek retribution for the snooty arrogance of her own mother by embracing charitable causes, and can't see that she is repeating the same pattern set by her own mother in frittering her children's inheritance on anyone but her children. The charitable cause in question is the hippyesque healing community run by Seamus, a convincing Irish charmer, in the French mansion that Patrick's mother has bequeathed to him.

The prose is beautiful - complex in parts, unconventional, thought-provoking and peceptive about the feelings and thoughts of both small kids and a piqued husband. The former is something most male authors don't attempt - putting into words the charm of small children has been almost exclusively in the domain of female writers. St Aubyn manages to do this without resorting to cloying, nauseating, twee cliches: there is no cooing over the cuteness of tiny fingers or dimples here, no metaphorical and painful pinching of cheeks. Some have criticised the children's comments as being too mature for their age, but for me, they worked perfectly and acted as a reference to the fact that children are often far more aware of their surroundings and far more intelligent and perceptive than adults give them credit for.
St Aubyn is also very convincing on Patrick, an alcoholic, and, crucially, he manages to describe the destructiveness of the addiction without being depressing and grey, like James Kelman in the almost unreadable How Late It Was , How Late, or Gerard Woodward in the brave but still dismal I'll Go to Bed at Noon. In fact, there are parts that are downright funny, like the drunken outing to the off-licence to replace a botle of whisky that Patrick has been surreptitiously slugging. The tug of conscience between duty and selfishness as regards thoughts on his aged mother who Patrick sulkily feels has let him down are also insightfully and sometimes hilariously drawn. Patrick manages to be selfish but not wildly dislikeable - he has no guilt feelings about his infidelity, and even Mary accepts it with resigned stoicism- and yet somehow his vulnerability as regards his alcoholism and his obvious love for his sons save him from becoming an ogre.
The peripheral characters are also captured exquisitely: Margaret, the clucking, know-it-all and somewhat bovine child minder in particular is a delight.


So, five stars and a round of applause for St Aubyn's book