I really enjoyed Double Blind, not least because of Benedict Cumberbatch’s excellent narration on the audiobook!
There’s a lot packed in to this book: mental health, love, bravery, illness, fear, adoption, climate change, genetics, inheritance and technology (there might be more, but this is off the top of my head!). These are all pretty meaty themes, but I think they were all addressed with sensitivity, and nothing seemed contrived - even though one of the characters was ridiculously rich!
There’s a fair bit of internal dialogue going on, but it’s all relevant to the story itself, and I feel it was easier to listen to than it might have been to read. In fact, this book seemed to go by really quickly - I thoroughly enjoyed it, and listened to it whenever I could.
The characters were all very likeable: Lucy has a brain tumour, and after the initial shock she takes the news very well. She works for an American called Hunter Sterling, a tycoon and hedonist. He takes a lot of drugs.
Francis is a conservationist on an estate, and he meets Olivia, a biologist. Her father is a psychoanalyst who works with schizophrenics (amongst others), in particular a man called Sebastian. His deeper connections emerge in the story.
All of these people and themes are woven into a beautifully written book. I loved it, and it looks as though I have another authors backlist to investigate!

Double Blind by Edward St. Aubyn is about human relationships and the nature of science covering issues of climate change, biological determinism and gene therapy.

Double Blind by Edward St Aubyn is mostly very different from his most celebrated novels in the Patrick Melrose series. The similarities are that the prose is beautifully written and the characters have interesting potential. However, after a relatively conventional beginning, the character development becomes sidelined and the plot starts to meander through too many ideas and topical themes, taking in neuroscience, genetics, the environment, mental health and ethics to name a few. I don’t think this novel is going to have wide appeal beyond those already steeped in the academic ideas and debates behind the numerous themes explored here,

DNF 2★
“When the human genome had been sequenced, it turned out to contain twenty-three thousand genes, about the same as a sea urchin’s, but drastically fewer than the forty thousand in rice.”

OK, I didn’t finish this, so what’s with the two stars? Well, I read, thoroughly, the first third, and there were parts that kept me interested. The author gets preachy, but at least he’s preachy on my side of most of the arguments, so that’s worth something.

I didn’t mind the two women, Lucy and Olivia, and even Francis wasn’t bad in small doses. Lucy’s been living with her very wealthy, influential ‘boyfriend’ and his family in New York when she’s invited to go to England to work with Francis who is keen on rewilding. She’s not happy marking time in comfort in NY – she wants to make a difference.

“Lucy wanted to help change things on a larger scale. Only last night a colleague had been telling her about the seeds from cotton plants that had been attacked by beetles, giving rise to a new generation of plants more resistant to beetle attack. Basing the development of seeds on epigenetically acquired characteristics would be a revolution in agriculture, using nature’s own defences rather than the violent crossbreeding of standard genetic modification. GM had produced few successes and met with enormous resistance.”

Then we learn that Olivia, a biologist, has been writing a book and is determined to add a last minute edit to include this mouse experiment.

”It was hardly surprising that the mice, electrocuted five times a day for three days, started to become ‘reliably fearful’ from exposure to the smell alone. What was challenging to the standard view of inheritance was that the offspring of those mice still exhibited fear in the presence of acetophenone, without being given any electric shocks themselves. Indeed, the effect lasted into a third generation.”

And Francis wants to save the world, so he has a job monitoring the regeneration of plants and animals on a large property.

“Trees that had withstood the demands of shipbuilding, the Industrial Revolution and the timber quotas of the Second World War were being killed by improvements in farming.”

So far, so good, and Lucy has a medical moment that is interesting, and the evolving relationship between the three is at least a plot line. But then Francis starts musing to himself (as he wanders the land, monitoring wildlife). He rambles on internally about consciousness, sentience, the Periodic Table, and God (knows what).

“It was, after all, a creation myth with many rivals. The ferocious Yanomami of Amazonia, for instance, believed that the world had been sneezed out by a god who had taken a high dose of the snuff to which the tribe was itself coincidentally addicted, and that his chosen people were leading their violent lives in a jungle of divine mucus. Christians believed in an omnipotent artist, who tossed off his masterpiece in six days, without accepting any editorial guidance, except from his most ardent enemy who suggested, after a wearisome pilot episode of Innocence, that introducing Evil would help to boost the viewing figures.”

Enough with Randomness, Complexity, and Emergence, and how a child might create an actual blue whale from Lego. It’s the kind of clever waffling that would have appealed to me in my youth, late at night, feeling intellectual. Now, I can’t be bothered. [But because I waded through so much, I will consider it read. :) ]

Too clever by half, as they used to say.

Thanks to NetGalley and Random House for the copy for review.

I loved reading the Patrick Melrose series, and I loved Edward St. Aubyn's style. But I find Double Blind really hard to get into. Parts about science were not easy to read, and to be honest, they didn't make me think about science. I just wanted to get over with those parts and read the story instead.

An unusual and intelligent book with some unique characters. Explores some important questions about modern life. It had rather a sudden ending, so I am expecting a sequel.

Incredibly self-indulgent. There are far too many passages dedicated to atoms and molecules that could have easily been cut down. The rewilding thing is interesting but there are too many other things going on.

First thing first: the style of writing is amazing and the characters are interesting. Unfortunately I felt like the plot was a bit disjointed and I lose interest in the second half of the book.
I want to read the Patrick Melrose novel but this one is not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

Oh wow. People shouldn’t be able to write as well as St Aubyn. The sheer scale of this novel, multiple richly drawn characters, some of the most pressing issues of our time all enveloped in beautifully chosen words and imagery. I instantly cared deeply about Olivia, Lucy and Sebastian. The other male characters were engaging but didn’t have the emotional draw to me that the women and Sebastian did.
To tackle climate change, cancer, artificial intelligence and schizophrenia in one novel with genuine human emotion and sensitivity but also fantastic comedy is a talent so few writers have. The character of Father Guido is up there with Shakespeare’s Falstaff for comic relief.
Double Blind is like an oak tree with so many of its branches able to support an entire novel of its own. I want to know the end of Olivia’s story, of Lucy’s, I want to hear about the impact of the wilding on Hunters various properties, did Happy Helmets hit the big time??
I actually audibly exclaimed “No!” When I realised I was on the last page.

Edward St Aubyn is one of those frustrating writers. Frustrating in the sense that it doesn’t matter how good you think you are yourself, or how good you might get, you’ll never be half the writer he is. A strong case could be made for him being one of the best living novelists in the UK and certainly the Patrick Melrose sequence must count as one of the most important set of literary novels in the past decades.

Double Blind doesn’t quite hit Melrose heights — certainly it’s not a patch on Bad News or Mother’s Milk — but it’s still vintage St Aubyn. To be fair, it’s endeavouring to cover a lot more ground than the Melrose quintet, which obviously focused very closely on Patrick’s misfortunes and misadventures. Double Blind, by contrast, touches upon genetics, ecology mortality, money, mental health and business and scientific ethics. That’s a lot of ground for anyone to cover in a relatively short novel and St Aubyn does it by and large very well indeed.

The novel doesn’t have an obvious central protagonist but rather concerns the interconnected lives of a small group of acquaintances and family members. As with most St Aubyn novels, these are pretty well-heeled types, gravitating around Oxfordshire, London’s Belsize Park and the south of France. Almost all of these are very well characterised indeed, with the possible exception of Hunter Sterling, the tech millionaire connected to several members of the core group. Unusually for St Aubyn, who is usually very good at writing the rich and making them remain believable. But perhaps Hunter is just too far into the stratospheric 1% because he never really leaps off the page and remains somewhat stuck in the world of literary trope, reminiscent of William Gibson’s Hubert Bigend and others. Certainly he lacks the vividness of a character like Nicholas Pratt from the Melrose novels.

Happily, all the other characters are far more convincingly drawn, particularly the central protagonist of Olivia and her fiancé Francis, both of whom are fine examples of the morally ambiguous and conflicted protagonists at which St Aubyn excels. And he deserves kudos for offering what feels like a pretty credible first-person interpretation of a character suffering from schizophrenia — something that’s pretty ambitious for any writer to attempt.

But this is far more of a broader satire than most of St Aubyn’s previous works, touching on tech and science’s role in our lives — and including a nicely wicked parody of a Richard Dawkins-type geneticist cum public intellectual. In this sense, it’s reminiscent perhaps of David Lodge’s Thinks or perhaps even Jonathan Franzen’s Purity. But amidst the broader, more philosophical and socio-political discussions, there are nice, more intimate, plot threads concerning Olivia and Francis’s love affair, their friend Lucy’s diagnosis with a brain tumour and Lucy’s father’s treatment of Sebastian’s mental health problems.

Less surprising is the fact that, for all the potentially heavy subject matter, that the novel is actually pretty funny. It should probably go without saying that a writer who managed a hugely entertaining quintet based around drug addiction and child abuse has done the same thing with cancer and mental health. In particular, the misadventures of the haplessly innocent abbot Father Guido sent on a Vatican-sponsored industrial espionage mission to Hunter’s private estate is pure Graham Greene and one of the novel’s many highlights.

Like most of St Aubyn’s novels, it’s not a long book and part of his success is in his ability not to overstay his welcome. I doubt we’ll ever see a Pynchonesque doorstop of a book from him and nor should we ever expect one. But what also saves the novel is the deftness with which he handles the plot, especially from the colossal coincidence that threatens to derail it about halfway through.

In many ways, Double Blind reads like a second attempt at the same subject matter of St Aubyn’s earlier A Clue to the Exit — the themes of mortality, science and consciousness appear in both — but if so it’s a more successful one, largely because the characters are crisper and the jokes are funnier. There’s also a deeper sense of emotional connection with the material that grounds the more abstruse sections and makes those that are more character focused all the more affecting.

I love the way Edward St Aubyn breaks the rules. He’s been known to jump around points of view within the same sentence, apparently, though I couldn’t find examples of it here. But there is a lot of zooming around characters’ heads in Double Blind. It’s as if St Aubyn writes in a state of breathlessness, trying to pack it all in.
And there’s a lot to pack in. This is a novel of big ideas, many of them. It takes in genetics, ecology, artificial intelligence, venture capitalism, virtual reality, brain mapping, mental illness, adoption, pregnancy and brain tumours. Oh, and the Vatican. It’s hard to keep up, both with the plot and the characters, as they bounce around London, Sussex, the US and France.
In summary, a young botanist called Francis is employed to rewild a country estate in the south of England. He falls in love with Olivia, a biologist, whose best friend, Lucy, has just started a new job with Hunter’s venture capital firm when she discovers she has a brain tumour.
Inevitably, you want to spend more time with some of the characters. I could have easily read an entire novel about Sebastian, the seriously disturbed young man who is being psychoanalysed by Olivia’s father (and who might in fact be Olivia’s adopted brother), whose Rorschachian interior and exterior monologues are bravura pieces of writing. Ditto Father Guido, the ingenue Vatican underling dispatched to Hunter’s estate in Nice to try and wrangle back the brain scan of the Blessed Fra Domenico, which the Vatican believes was nefariously obtained. Father Guido gets the best scenes, necking cocktails that he believes to be lemonade and dancing to Kraftwerk at Hunter’s private party – and that’s before someone drops an E into his drink.
There’s enough material here for another pentalogy. Double Blind is great fun, but it’s an exhausting read.
Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

What a wonderful writer St Aubyn is - he could make a shopping list sound fascinating. The Patrick Melrose novels are amongst my favourite ever reads and this too was beautifully written, funny in places, full of classical and Shakespearian allusions and for the most part a delight to read although at times there seemed to be too much and too many new characters being fitted in.

A treat indeed but you have to work hard for it in some parts of the book.

2.5 rounded down

A book of two halves... from the way this was set up in the opening stages, I thought it held real promise. The writing was intelligent, and the scientific/medical elements slotted in with the narrative without being overly confusing - various characters are biologists, psychiatrists, conservationists, and one character is diagnosed with a brain tumour, one is undergoing therapy etc.

And then at the halfway point things went south for this reader. New characters were introduced with little context and who added nothing to the story. Ultimately there was way too much going on, and none of it was particularly well executed.

The second of St. Aubyn's novels I've read (I ended up DNFing Never Mind), and perhaps it's time to accept that his style isn't for me.

This is a difficult and ambitious book that just failed to hit the mark for me. The science bits can come over as undigested research and some of the characters border on caricature. The big ideas keep coming, the narrative is driven by multiple characters who have randomly changing priorities and the ending is strangely abrupt.

There is some lovely writing in between, the interplay of some of the characters and the descriptions of Howorth and its rewilding project. Some of the characters are just being played with, such as the innocent priest and the glamorous soft-porn dream that is Hope, and nowhere do we get real depth of character, especially in the stereotypical women.

Overall a challenging read that sparks some ideas but also some incredulity, and the conclusion after laboriously bringing all the characters together then missing an opportunity for closure was quite odd.

Double Blind is a book you will love and embrace or you will hate it and struggle to finish it. It's very hard to find a middle ground with it. You either appreciate what it's trying to do or say or it falls flat for you.
It has interesting characters who are convincing and fit well into the overall plot of the story which deals with many contemporary issues.

There is much I enjoyed in Edward St. Aubyn's latest novel with its Shakespearian allusions, not least his wonderfully vivid prose, but it also feels over ambitious in its multitude of issues raised, all of which he obviously cares about, but which overall result in weakening the coherence of the storytelling. The themes of climate change, genetics, inheritance, technology in the field of neuroscience are tackled through its wide ranging main and minor characters. Francis is a conservationist involved in rewilding efforts on the Howarth estate, owned by a philanthropic couple in West Sussex. His lover, Olivia, is a biologist who becomes pregnant, her friend Lucy returns from New York to run a start up set up by the eye catching venture capitalist tycoon, the hedonist Hunter Sterling, with his recreational drug taking and copious alcohol intake.

The connections between them grow stronger when it becomes known that Lucy has a brain tumour. We are given insights into their interior lives, ruminations on consciousness and the state of the universe. The adopted Olivia's psychoanalyst takes on a client, the schizophrenic Sebastian, with whom more connections are to emerge. There are entertaining and satirical aspects, wit and comic touches that turn into pure farce, and parties, but many of the interesting issues end up hanging in the air, which is such a shame. Nevertheless, I think many readers will appreciate this story of survival, mental health issues, adoption, love, bravery and fear. For me, its greatest strength is the quality of the beautiful writing which so often captivates and mesmerises. Many thanks to Random House Vintage for an ARC.

I have enjoyed Edward St. Aubyn’s work in the past but I was very disappointed in Double Blind – so much so that I gave up before the end.

The story is of three friends and associated characters and is well summarised in the publishers’ blurb, as two of them embark on a deep love affair and another becomes seriously ill with a brain tumour. St. Aubyn uses this on which to hang a lot (and I mean a lot) of talk and internal monologue about the nature of science, the roles of genetics and environment in human development, psychoanalysis, ecology, mental illness, where and how brain activity becomes consciousness...and so on.

He writes well (of course), although I found the dialogue a bit clunky at times, with things like this when discussing memories: “ ‘I’ve heard that some people can catch a ride on a madeleine,’ said Hunter, ‘but the French already have the patent on that low-tech time machine.’ ” Really? As a spontaneous remark in a discussion? Hmm. I also found some of the characterisation a bit crude, especially the thoroughly unsubtle contrast between Francis, the poorly paid but sincere ecological researcher who is lovely, mindful and holistic, and Howard, the billionaire grasping, exploitative, drug-riddled, reductionist sexual predator.

What really got me, though, was the sheer hogwash talked about science in places. There follows a lengthy quotation from the book which both gives a flavour of its style and content and also illustrate why I got so annoyed with it:
“Space, instead of being a desolate interval between pinpricks of sentience, must be the conscious medium in which these more obvious forms of consciousness were concentrated. If matter was not inherently conscious, then one had to fall back on the official story that the pinpricks of sentience existed in an otherwise inanimate universe thanks to a mind-numbingly long poker game in which the elements of the Periodic Table had been dealt out again and again until one bit of deadness haphazardly acquired the Full House of life, and then only a few million hands later, the Royal Flush of consciousness. This Royal Flush Theory was defended by three rowdy musketeers: Randomness, Complexity and Emergence. Hurrah! They came with all the plumage and the inane bravado of swashbuckling heroes who love nothing better than to get themselves into an impossible position: fighting for reductionism’s attempt to subsume the irreducible. Despite all their rooftop antics, the only proposition they really had to offer was that luck multiplied by time transubstantiated matter. It was like claiming that if a child played Lego for long enough her mother might come down one day and find a blue whale emerging from the carpet. After the initial struggle to get her smartphone back from the whale in which enough consciousness had emerged for it to google the location of the nearest beach, and after telling her daughter to please stop playing with that Lego set, a certain perplexity might set in about how matter had rearranged itself so unexpectedly. The authoritative answer would be that it had become complex thanks to Complexity, and that once Complexity passed a critical threshold, consciousness emerged thanks to Emergence, and that it was forbidden to think that consciousness was involved at any earlier stage because Randomness had been placed there to banish superstition. This explanation might not strike the puzzled parent as entirely persuasive. It was, after all, a creation myth with many rivals.”
And:
“Science had swept away these childish stories of sneezing gods and dreaming gods, of divine artists and divine sperm, of golden rain and copulating swans, in order to place some thoroughly sanitised but equally non-explanatory concepts at the inception of its narratives.”
And
“How It Began, a subject to which the only coherent response was silence.”

This is not the place for a detailed thesis on the philosophy of science, but I will say that
a) Evolution is a mind-numbingly long poker game, but the theory stands up to every test to which it is subjected, and
b) Current theories about the origins of the universe are most certainly not Creation Myths. They have both a logical, evidential structure and, vitally, predictive power. The “non-explanatory concepts” are simply statements that our knowledge is incomplete - but one of science’s great strengths is that it acknowledges when it doesn’t know things but strives to learn more. The science which works on the origin of the universe has brought us, among many, many other things, the internet and Covid vaccines. Creation myths have not. And the idea that our only response to the question of how it all began should be silence...well, ironically, words fail me.

Enough. I ploughed on through a good deal more of this stuff in a wide range of subjects but found it deeply unsatisfying and sometimes thoroughly annoying. Eventually I decided that life was too short. There are some good things about this book, but there is also a good deal of utter hogwash. I expected better from Edward St. Aubyn and I can’t recommend this.

(My thanks to Vintage Books for an ARC via NetGalley.)

There is much to admire in this novel: the quality of the writing, including some fast dialogue, the erudition and coverage of many contemporary issues as well as a compelling plot with convincing and diverse characters

But it is also a baggy thing, personal relationships coincide with pages of exposition covering neuroscience, nature and nurture, capitalism and I felt it switched from genre to genre rather too often. At times it felt very like reading an Iris Murdoch novel, with science replacing the philosophical musings. It too often felt like accidentally stumbling into the wrong lecture, and being simultaneously bored and dazzled by the topic and speaker.

I admired it but didn't really like it.

A strange book, in which the first part seems 'normal', the second takes a peculiar turn, bordering on the ridiculous, and the third returns to being a mix between normal and excessive. Not that the book is not a pleasant read, but the author's purpose is not clear to me, so much so that it is one of those books that I catalogue among those that do not begin and do not end.

Strano libro, in cui la prima parte sembra "normale" la second prende una piega particolare, al limite del ridicolo e la terza torna ad essere un mix tra normale ed eccessivo. Non che il libro non sia una piacevole lettura, ma lo scopo dell'autore non mi é chiaro, tant'é che é uno di quei libri che catalogo tra quelli che non cominciano e non finiscono.

I RECEIVED A COMPLIMENTARY DIGITAL ADVANCED REVIEW COPY FROM THE PUBLISHER IN EXCHAGE FOR A HONEST REVIEW!

In a departure from his usual style, Edward St, Aubyn has written an ambitious, issue-driven novel chronicling topical concerns such as climate change, biological determinism and gene therapy. Sending up the audacity of the modern scientific approach for solving our current ‘global malaise’ - and our failure to reconcile the uncertainties of life with our human expectations - he satirises the theories of neuroscientists, physicists, geneticists and psychotherapists, to name but a few, with his mesmerising prose.
This is the second novel that I’ve read by this author (Lost for Words was the first) and it has inspired me to read his back catalogue.