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.
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.
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.
Interestingly troubled characters ... Potent compound of dark wit and flinty compassion ... I have seldom read a novel that argues more cogently for the hard-won breakthroughs of psychoanalysis ...
If there is a flaw in St Aubyn’s dramas of consciousness it’s the tendency of his characters all to think and talk in the same register of droll irony ... From suicide observation room to cutting-edge art installation, Parallel Lines plots quite the journey ... In a lesser writer the temptations of sentimentality would get the upper hand, but St Aubyn is clear-sighted and humane on the basic requirement of life.
St Aubyn...is more skilful than most ... A novel rich in characters and perspectives ... St Aubyn’s talent is to tease his characters—sending up their middle-class foibles—while still extending tenderness to each of them ... As the story whips along and the various characters loop round and crash into one another, this serious engagement with each of them is what helps keep the whole enterprise afloat ... There’s real skill on display here, as there often is in a St Aubyn novel ... The book’s setting, especially London, is drawn with the same care ... Building towards a showdown that threatens to break its characters and their values. It doesn’t disappoint.
In a novel brimming with wordplay, Sebastian’s is the most characterful..his responses are fresh and pertinent ... The characters...remain undeveloped and defined largely by their intellectual and political concerns ... The novel bristles with ideas...St Aubyn opts to tell rather than show ... The ideas are baldly presented, tending to clog the narrative rather than engage the reader ... The same is true of the overextended metaphors randomly distributed among the characters ... With certain metaphors running to a dozen or more lines, they serve to obscure rather than enhance the initial thought ... St Aubyn is at his best in comic set pieces, which recall the brilliance of the Patrick Melrose quintet ... Overall, however, although the parallel lines of the novel converge, its individual elements fail to cohere.
Sprawling, convoluted and underwhelming ... This novel circles round and round itself in desultory search of a plot ... There are hints of St Aubyn’s scabrous wit in Sebastian’s psychotic episodes (the author is not one to pussyfoot around the subject of insanity) but precious little evidence of his lacerating intelligence and stylistic brio. Disappointing.
That Martin would not immediately recuse himself on learning of his daughter’s relationship to his 'most traumatised patient' begins, however, to smack of a rather rudimentary contrivance ... The make-do mechanics of St Aubyn’s plot mean that, once the matter of Sebastian’s incorporation into the Carr family dynamic has largely been settled–after, admittedly, an extremely well-written three-way argument between Lizzie, Martin and Olivia–the novel has nowhere to go, and resolves on a coda whose blackly comic digressions on nuclear war fail to make amends for the general sense of misty-eyed anticlimax ... Yet, as ever, the dialogue and close-third-person narration are at times so tight, so fluent, so alert to ambiguity and compressed in their intellection as to absolve the novel, almost, from its structural shortcomings ... Then there’s Sebastian. As I say, St Aubyn can be chary of giving his characters their fair measure of freedom, but in Olivia’s tormented, untutored but naturally perceptive twin, the author has created a figure far removed from his stock-in-trade, the posh pain in the neck, and one of unsettling intensity and pathos ... Edward St Aubyn has suppressed his caustic wit to bring a character alive.
An elegantly arch but empathetic excursion into impending apocalypse, and some of St. Aubyn’s best work yet ... St. Aubyn’s piece makes a neat companion to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas in depicting harried people constantly on the run, on the make, and at the end of their tethers in a time of crumbling civilization...all with great good slashingly sarcastic humor. St. Aubyn’s closing, which leaves room for another episode, is quite sincere, though, and even affecting in recounting Sebastian and Olivia’s tentative efforts to form not just a relationship but a family, the only bastion against doom.
