Mother's Milk

Book Review

Edward St. Aubyn

Mother's Milk features the same family that Edward St. Aubyn introduced in his acclaimed trilogy Some Hope. It is a hilarious satire on the family and human relationships.

The story opens with the older Melrose son, Robert, narrating his own birth. This is reminiscent of the opening pages of Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and it works equally as well, but in a different way. Robert is wise beyond his years, but pitiful as well as he bemoans the lack of closeness and comfort he so recently had in his mother's womb. As Robert grows older, he reminds one of the malevolently precocious Marmaduke from Martin Amis' London Fields, who goes from ailing helpless infant to an alarmingly knowing terror overnight (though Robert is less ill-willed):

“…from the feverish grub of the old Marmaduke sprang a musclebound wunderkind, clear-eyed, pink-tongued, and (it transpired) infallibly vicious. The change was all very sudden. Guy and Hope went out one day, leaving the usual gastroenteritic nightmare slobbering on the kitchen floor; they returned after lunch to find Marmaduke strolling round the drawing room with his hands in his pockets…”

Robert's brother, Thomas, is younger and quite devoted to his mother Mary. He is also astonishingly self-aware, uttering comments such as “No Mama, don't pick me up, it's really unbearable.” He is extremely adept from a very early age at coming between his mother and father.

Mary, the mother, is exceptionally devoted to her two boys, to the complete physical and mental exclusion of her husband, Patrick. He has a volatile temper and a scathing tongue, and uses the distance that is steadily growing between his family to fuel his speeches about everything from marital relations to the war in Iraq .

The novel spans three years in the family's lives and moves from England to their ancestral home in France , where Patrick's mother is insisting on donating the heap to her pet New Age charity, to America , for a disastrous family holiday. The plot, though, is really secondary, and that is not to say that this novel isn't a page turner. It is. It is, however, the interpersonal relations of the family members that enables St. Aubyn to display his acerbic wit and biting satirical style. This is an amazing, inventive, hilarious novel – just don't take it as the final word on familial relations!

“Why had they pretended to kill him when he was born? Keeping him awake for days, banging his head again and again against a closed cervix; twisting the cord around his throat and throttling him; chomping through his mother's abdomen with cold shears; clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side; dragging him out of his home and hitting him; shining lights in his eyes and doing experiments; taking him away from his mother while she lay on the table, half-dead. Maybe the idea was to destroy his nostalgia for the old world. First the confinement to make him hungry for space, then pretending to kill him so that he would be grateful for the space when he got it, even this loud desert, with only the bandages of his mother's arms to wrap around him, never the whole thing again, the whole warm thing all around him, being everything.”