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This is the book that should have won the Booker Prize last year. What on earth the judges were thinking of I just cannot imagine. They let us down. Again. ''Mother's Milk'' continues the story of Patrick Melrose, the victim of paternal abuse in St Aubyn's [[Some Hope]] trilogy. This time, as the title suggests, it's Patrick's mother who is letting him down. She's become involved with a New Age Foundation in favour of which she remorselessly disinherits Patrick, piece by family piece. ''Mother's Milk'' is elegant, it's witty, it's savage. Its insight is clear and piercing. Its prose style is beyond compare. St Aubyn handles multiple narrators with ease. It is dense and complicated but easy to read. In comparison, Kiran Desai's [[''The Inheritance of Loss]] '' seems horribly insipid. You were cheated, Mr St Aubyn. But I didn't like your book.
I'll come clean. I'm an inverted snob. I've no patience with the whining of the spoiled rich. Patrick's mummy wills the ancestral pile (well, family villa in the south of France, actually, but it's the same thing from where I'm sitting and from where most of us are sitting) to a New Age shyster. Patrick, a leading London barrister, feels utterly impoverished by this and uses it as a justification for slipping into a drug-fuelled alcoholic stupor from which he emerges only to conduct an extra-marital affair or to complain bitterly to anyone who'll listen. His wife, Mary, is utterly absorbed with their younger son, Thomas. I suppose they're not quite poor enough for Mary to have to make ends meet with an evening shift on the tills at ASDA, y'see. The older Melrose child, Robert, is a deep, intelligent child and Patrick's bitterness rubs off on him.