Parallel Lines
In spite of the neat geometry suggested by its title, the book carries on the scattershot approach to narrative, bombarding the reader with 'concepts and moods, impressions and expressions, like insects splattering against a windscreen on a summer drive' ... Mr. St. Aubyn deeply inhabits the dizzying free-associative whirlwind of a mind besieged by schizophrenia ... But the novel lives less in its plot twists than in the racing minds of its characters as they try, like Sebastian (if to lesser degrees of emergency), to understand and make peace with their natures ... Hunter, inspired by his love of Lucy and humbled by his inability to buy her a cure, undergoes the most touching, if incredible, transformation from loutish tech-bro to sensitive spiritualist ... Hunter’s rehabilitation dovetails with Sebastian’s to give Parallel Lines a surprisingly hopeful complexion. Mr. St. Aubyn’s ravenous curiosity about the quandaries of existence makes his intellectual investigations feel vital and exciting, despite their shapelessness. Equally as stimulating is his hunger for goodness.
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Uneven ... Sebastian is a preposterously winning fictional creation ... St. Aubyn is worth reading, nearly all the time, because his novels contain brutal and funny intellectual content. He’s a briny writer, one who dispatches a stream of salty commentary, sentences that whoosh past like arrows ... St. Aubyn’s talents are mighty, so much so that you wonder why this novel, and its predecessor, aren’t even better than they are. Parallel Lines is a high-level entertainment, but it’s so incident- and idea-packed that nothing quite sticks.
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St Aubyn dips in and out of his characters’ viewpoints somewhat randomly. A Catholic priest pops up, meditates, then vanishes. The plot is minimal ... The social chasm between Olivia and Sebastian is barely explored. The most convincing emotional thread concerns Olivia and Francis’s tenderness towards Noah, but other characters are under-developed ... Mordant humour abounds. Still, nothing cuts too deeply, and you quickly begin to notice that everyone talks in this mannered way ... The subject matter hums with wasted potential.
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