Week one: a child's perception
It is summer 2001 in Provence and 43-year-old barrister Patrick, father of two sons, husband to Mary, has been propositioning an ex-girlfriend, Julia, in the garden of his mother's house. Julia is distinctly responsive, but the amour cannot be pursued for the moment; they must rejoin family and friends for lunch. As they do so, Patrick smiles at his wife, picks up his baby, and sits down next to his six?year-old son Robert, "feeling as he did when he defended an obviously guilty client in front of a famously difficult judge". There is more than a hint of respect in Patrick's attitude towards Robert. "Robert noticed everything."
This is Patrick's thought, for in this section of the novel we are seeing things entirely from his viewpoint. Yet the reader already has reason to share the father's conviction that his young son is likely to see through him.
Mother's Milk is divided into four sections and the whole of its first section, dated a year earlier in August 2000, is narrated from the viewpoint of the then five-year-old Robert. Before we ever inhabit the thoughts of Patrick (in the second section) or Mary (in the third), we have seen and heard everything through Robert. So adult insight comes from a child witness. St Aubyn's anti-realist trick is to combine the child's perceptions with the perfectly rendered, languorously sophisticated dialogue of the adults with whom he keeps company. He listens with perfect attention to his father discussing with Julia the differences between adults and children. "We're more easily distracted . . . more used to a culture of substitution." Robert does not quite get this. "Substitution must be something pretty wonderful," he imagines. But he records the observation punctiliously.
Robert is being inducted into the world of words, and feeling the loss that comes with all its gains. His baby brother Thomas shares with his mother some "silent language" that Robert has now lost, "so caught up in building sentences that he has almost forgotten the barbaric days when thinking was like a splash of colour landing on a page". Robert is, somewhat unnervingly, thinking this, as his mother and father sit in the front of the car, parodying the gruesome vulgarians with whom they have just had lunch in Saint-Tropez ("world-famous joke of a town", as his father has it).
The child's thinking has the very verbal sophistication that he briefly regrets as he yearns for his younger brother's wordless bond with his mother. In the novel's extraordinary opening pages, Robert imagines (or "remembers", as he thinks) himself being born ? dragged out into the light: "never the whole things again, the whole warm thing all around him, being everything".
Later in the novel, we find Patrick aware of "the subtle tenacity of the destructive influence that parents had on their children ? that he had on his children". We already know the influence of parents on children from its first chapters.
No wonder Robert, and later Thomas, are so good with words, for their parents converse with a kind of desperate articulacy. As we get to know their mordant eloquence, we do so through their infant son. So in the novel's first chapters we are not just reading St Aubyn's dialogue, we are listening to it with Robert.
In one sequence, we hear his father's furious outburst when he finds out that his demented mother is bequeathing her lovely French home to a charlatan who wants to turn it into a New Age retreat. Mary laughs as she likens her mother-in-law to a mix of "King Lear and Mrs Jellyby". As Patrick confirms, she is the product of "a quick rut between the feeble tyrant and the fanatical philanthropist". The whole exchange is transmitted through a baby monitor to the listening Robert. It is natural that he becomes a gifted mimic of adult idiolects.
The novel, we might say, enacts Patrick's and Mary's anxieties about how the world might seem to their children. The child's perception comes before everything. Patrick is not even named until page 83: throughout the first section of the novel he is "his father", and it is with a jolt at the beginning of the sixth chapter that he takes on his singular identity and we get into his head. It is also a jolt when we find him contemplating adultery and ruing the presence of his son "the insomniac observation-freak".
The bleak comedy of Patrick's sexual frustration (Mary having retreated into intimacy with their baby son) is all the funnier because we already know that Robert is indeed a sharp-eyed, sharp-eared witness. In the depths of one insomniac, sex-starved night, Patrick is poised at Julia's door when Robert suddenly appears to ask him what he is doing. He talks of worrying about Robert's younger brother being awake, but thinks something different. "Robert was too intelligent for this rubbish, but perhaps he was a shade too young to be told the truth." But only a shade.
John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Join him and Edward St Aubyn for a discussion on Tuesday 7 June at 7pm in the Scott Room, the Guardian, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1. Tickets �8 ? online booking only (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/09/edward-staubyn-book-club). Inquiries: 020 3353 2881.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/28/mothers-milk-edward-st-aubyn-bookclub
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