Name: A Clue to the Exit
Rating: 3 (1 reviews)

Edward St. Aubyn

Charlie Fairburn, successful screenwriter of Aliens with a Human Heart, ex-husband and absent father, has been given 6 months to live. He resolves to stake half his fortune on a couple of turns of the roulette wheel and, to his agent's disgust, to write a novel - about death. In the casino he meets his muse. Charlie grows as addicted to writing fiction as she is to gambling. Charlie's novel is set on a train and involves a group of characters locked in a debate about the nature of consciousness. As the train gets stuck at Didcot Junction and Charlie gets more passionately entangled with the dangerous young woman who is his nemesis, A Clue to the Exit comes to its startling climax. Exquisitely crafted, witty and thoughtful, Edward St Aubyn's dazzling new novel overturns expectations and probes the very heart of being.

A Clue to the Exit

Charlie Fairburn, successful screenwriter, ex-husband and absent father, has been given six months to live. He resolves to stake half his fortune on a couple of turns of the roulette wheel and, to his agent's disgust, to write a novel - about death. In the casino he meets his muse. Charlie grows as addicted to writing fiction as she is to gambling. His novel is set on a train and involves a group of characters (familiar to readers of St Aubyn's earlier work) who are locked in a debate about the nature of consciousness. As this train gets stuck at Didcot, and Charlie gets more passionately entangled with the dangerous Angelique, A Clue to the Exit comes to its startling climax. Exquisitely crafted, witty and thoughtful, Edward St Aubyn's dazzling novel probes the very heart of being. âe~Perhaps the most brilliant English novelist of his generationâe(tm) Alan Hollinghurst

Gavin

Has many of St Aubyn's distinctive virtues - acute black comedy about every social stratum, characters creatively misspending resources, the sometime delight of being exploited, actual knowledge of modern philosophy - but this time it doesn't gel.

The protagonist, Fairburn, writes a book with Patrick Melrose as a character - which invites us to identify Fairburn with St Aubyn. But it doesn't fit very well; Fairburn's life work is meaningless and saccharine. They are both troubled and self-destructive and possibly redeemed I suppose. 

The enframed narrative with Patrick is annoying, and annoyingly this is intentional:

  Yesterday Angelique came into the bedroom holding my thin manuscript. She moved towards the open window and I surged up from the pillows shouting, ‘Don’t!’
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to throw it out of the window — that would be doing you a favour.’
‘You don’t like it?’
‘It’s wooden and dry and boring. I can’t believe this is what you want to do with your last days. Why don’t you write about how wonderful the figs taste when you know you may never taste one again?’
‘Because they don’t,’ I said, ‘they taste like ash.’
‘Why don’t you tell us how we must live every moment to the full because life is so precious?’
‘Because if it’s dying that makes you realize that, you’re already too anxious to do anything about it. I wanted to do something serious…’
‘You are doing something serious: you’re dying,’ she said, laughing.
‘Something impersonal.’
‘But that’s exactly the problem: you must make it more personal, more human, more dramatic. You should write from your own experience, write about us... I think the real problem is that you don’t know how to make abstract ideas exciting...’
She left the room and, paralysed by failure and confusion, I watched the breeze scatter the pages across the floor.


This is a good skewering of upper-middle-class / academic conceit:

  The warden’s sly, pedantic chuckle seemed to reverberate among the bookshops and gargoyles that guarded the taxi rank; his gurgling complacencies soaked the golden buildings until they split open like soggy trifle. Perhaps they had once been intended for something serious, but there had been too many puns, too many Latin tags, too many acrostics, too many fiendish crossword puzzles, too many witty misquotations and too many sly chuckles for them to do anything but rot, however noble and solid they might look to the winking eye of a tourist’s camera.



Many, many different ideas about consciousness show up appear, from the zany (Penrose and Sheldrake) to the canonical (Colin McGinn and Galen Strawson). The stuff on Penrose and Sheldrake is accurate, in the weak sense that it describes their positions correctly. Sadly it's mysterianism that wins over Patrick / Charlie. The conclusion is roughly a celebration of the mere manifest image, quietism, Wittgenstein's gallic shrug. It manages to miss the point of scientific interest in consciousness, and underestimate the progress it's made already:

   I saw the latest cluster of books to emerge from the great consciousness debate: Emotional Intelligence, The Feeling Brain, The Heart’s Reasons. I felt the giddy relief of knowing that I wasn’t going to read any of them. The fact that science has decided to include emotion in its majestic worldview seems about as astute as an astronomer discovering the moon.



Oh well. Plenty of cynical goodness besides. For instance, I have felt the following emotion, back when I didn't have the spine to refuse to go clubbing:

   I sat down on a velvet bench and through all the smoke and the bad music and the undesirable desire I suddenly allowed myself to become relaxed. Even here there was no need to posture. The essential question remained the same. Where could I find freedom in this situation? I looked around and felt reconciled with all the people in Alessandro's party and all the people in the room. I could spray adjectives at them for the rest of the evening, but in the end they were just people struggling to be happy with only the most unpromising material at their disposal.

A Clue to the Exit

Reviews

Highlights