The novelist on trying to escape Patrick Melrose, recovering from long Covid and putting to rest rumours that he wrote the eulogy for Princess Diana
Most interviews in the lockdown era are conducted by video, but the novelist Edward St Aubyn and I are talking by old-fashioned telephone because, his publicist warns me beforehand, “Teddy doesn’t do Zoom.” Of course he doesn’t. In truth, it’s a surprise that Teddy does telephones, because he often gives the impression that his presence in prosaic 21st-century London – as opposed to early 20th-century Russia alongside his great-uncle Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, or 19th-century Britain with his great-grandfather, the Liberal MP Sir John St Aubyn, first Baron St Levan – is an administrative error shortly to be rectified.
His novels satirise the foibles of the world around him with the savagery of a true insider, such as when he takes on the petty snobberies of social climbers, and the bemusement of one who finds the modern world a frequent source of frustration. Mother’s Milk – the fourth book in his Patrick Melrose series – was nominated for the Booker prize in 2006; it didn’t win, but he metabolised the experience into 2014’s Lost for Words, in which he described literary prize-givings with the horrified amusement of an alien gazing upon bizarre human rituals. (Alas, not even mockery could save him from being subjected to such indignities again: Lost for Words won the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction.)
