Edward St Aubyn’s Comedy of Horrors

The great achievement of Edward St Aubyn’s literary career is to have brokered a merger between two vast, international and mutually hostile enterprises, the English comic novel and the more continental tradition of psychological realism. This might have been a doomed venture, involving the acquaintance of two largely incompatible balance sheets: the English offering of alliteratively named side-characters, wearisome verbal gags and frothy plot contortions, compelled to rub up against steppe-borne existentialists, conscience-wracked breakdowns and appeals to the Almighty. One imagines a beaming PG Wodehouse shaking the skeletal hand of Fyodor Dostoevsky, or Kingsley Amis belching with laughter in the unstirring face of Samuel Beckett.