At Last

The horrors of Patrick Melrose's childhood, except for a couple explicit incidents recounted in the earlier novels, could only be inferred from the wreck that his life became. With At Last, Edward St. Aubyn reveals the full scale of David Melrose's cruelty and perversity, and a Patrick some readers may have dismissed as a navel-gazer emerges as a damaged soul refusing to give up. (As a youth he carried around a copy of The Myth of Sisyphus.) As if to answer critical readers, Patrick himself takes a shot at the critics of navel-gazers, saying they are the ones who, despite all the advice to "get over" traumas, never get over anything because they simply forget. The concluding novel in the series is centered around the funeral of Patrick's mother, Eleanor. "The glory of his mother's death was that she could no longer get in the way of his own maternal instincts with her presumptive maternal presence and stop him from embracing the inconsolable wreck that she had given birth to."