A story about a group of wildly different characters whose fates are improbably yet inextricably linked—a novel about extinction and survival, inheritance and loss.
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.
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.
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.
