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This is a novel of ideas, crammed with scientific data, that suffers from too much itemising and cataloguing
A double-blind research study is one in which both the researchers and the participants are in the dark: since no one knows who is receiving the drugs and who the placebos, there’s less risk of the result being skewed by prior knowledge. In an ideal world, the double-blind principle also holds good for fiction: every novel is a thought experiment with an unpredictable outcome. The difficulty – a double-bind rather than double-blind – is that prior knowledge invariably plays a part: the novelist knows what readers are hoping for, and the blurb and the dust jacket tell them what to expect.
What defined Edward St Aubyn’s quintet of Patrick Melrose novels was their bitter comedy and sadistic wit, and though his two subsequent novels (one a satire on literary prizes, the other a reworking of King Lear) were attempts to alter the template, their tone remained much the same. Double Blind opens in unfamiliar territory, as an earnest, unworldly young botanist called Francis wanders through a country estate, Howorth, where he lives off-grid and is employed as part of a wilding project. Seemingly purged of irony, the tone is more DH Lawrence than Evelyn Waugh and almost rapturous in its pantheism (“He felt the life around him and the life inside him flowing into each other”). Francis’s pure-mindedness extends even to his drug-taking, magic mushrooms being his hallucinogen of choice: “How could pharmaceutical companies, messing about for the last few decades, hope to compete with the expertise of fungi.” Where Patrick Melrose’s trauma was childhood abuse and neglect, for Francis it’s abuse and neglect of the planet, for which a new interconnectedness with nature is the only cure. Continue reading...