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 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.
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.
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.
