He saw all the causes from the unknowable edges of time which, for all he knew, had no edges, converging on his body in that moment to make it no other than it was. And then he saw that his body was itself a cause dispersing its effects into the future. He saw time rippling in and, caught in the revolution of a moment, rippling out again. History and all possible futures were just the interference pattern of those converging and diverging waves of causality. And then he saw that what rippled in and what rippled out were the same thing, because his body was no more focal than any other point and this moment was no more focal than any other moment. It was as true to call the stillness rippling as to call the rippling stillness, or the stillness stillness, or the rippling rippling …
‘Far out,’ he murmured.
‘What?’ whispered Crystal.
‘I’ve seen how the whole thing works.’
‘What? The yoni and the lingam?’ said Crystal. ‘You didn’t know that before?’
Peter laughed. ‘No. The universe,’ he said.
‘Oh, the universe,’ said Crystal, relieved. ‘Sabine’s favourite subject.’
‘Now you’ve ruined my mystical experience,’ said Peter.
‘It was that easy? It just disappeared at the mention of a woman you don’t like as much as you used to?’
‘Yup,’ said Peter. ‘I guess we’re going to have to painstakingly reconstruct the moments that led up to it.’
‘That never works,’ said Crystal. ‘We’ll have to approach it from a new angle.’
Infolding and outfolding at the same time. She smiled as the phrase returned to her from Jean-Paul’s letter.
Leaning forward she sucked one of Peter’s nipples. The sensation pierced and soothed him like a hummingbird.
Crystal knelt astride him and held his face between her cupped hands.
‘A new angle,’ she repeated, her knees spreading outwards and backwards as she slid down the sheets to join him.
ALSO BY EDWARD ST. AUBYN
The Patrick Melrose Novels
(Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope,
Mother’s Milk, and At Last)
Lost for Words
PRAISE FOR THE PATRICK MELROSE NOVELS
“Tantalizing … A memorable tour de force.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
“A remarkable cycle of novels … The books are written with an utterly idiosyncratic combination of emotional precision, crystalline observation, and black humor, as if one of Evelyn Waugh’s wicked satires about British aristos had been mashed up with a searing memoir of abuse and addiction, and injected with Proustian meditations on the workings of memory and time.”
—Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times
“Stunning, sparkling fiction … Unforgettable.”
—
The Wall Street Journal
“One of the great comic writers of our time … [A] sprightly, caustic, and harrowing novel sequence.”
—
The New York Review of Books
“Gorgeous, golden prose … St. Aubyn is utterly fearless when faced with the task of unpacking and anatomizing the inner lives of characters. No emotion is so subtle and fleeting he can’t convey it, or so terrifying or shameful that he can’t face it.”
—Lev Grossman,
Time
“One of the most amazing reading experiences I’ve had in a decade.”
—Michael Chabon,
Los Angeles Times
“Parental death, heroin, childhood rape, emotional frigidity, suicide, alcoholism … nothing about the plots can prepare you for the rich, acerbic comedy of St. Aubyn’s world—or more surprising—its philosophical density.”
—Zadie Smith,
Harper’s Magazine
“One of the best fictional cycles in contemporary fiction.”
—
The Boston Globe
“Powerfully aphoristic, lucid prose.… On every page of St. Aubyn’s work is a sentence or a paragraph that prompts a laugh, or a moment of enriched comprehension.”
—James Wood,
The New Yorker
“Extraordinary … Acidic humor, stiletto-sharp.”
—Francine Prose
“The best books I’ve read all year.… They’re riotously funny. St. Aubyn writes sentences that are so beautiful it almost hurts to read them. And his dialogue is the best I’ve ever come across. I can’t recommend these books enough.”
—Maria Semple, author of
Where’d You Go, Bernadette
“St. Aubyn writes like an angel. As far as I’m concerned, his books are better than Evelyn Waugh’s.”
—David Ives,
New York Post
“Brilliant … These are addictive and enormously enjoyable novels, full of juicy dialogue, narrative acrobatics, and expert characterization.… A tremendously moving depiction of recovery and survival, without a drop of sentimentality to sully or dilute the experience.”
—
Details
“The most brilliant English novelist of his generation.”
—Alan Hollinghurst
“The Melrose novels are among the smartest and most beautiful fictional achievements of the past twenty years.”
—
New York Observer
“I read the five Patrick Melrose novels in five days. When I finished, I read them again.”
—Ann Patchett,
The Guardian (London)
“Take P. G. Wodehouse’s lighthearted country-house tales of the British aristocracy, then dip them in an acid bath of irony, drug abuse, and general decay, and you have Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels.… St. Aubyn’s novels fall into that rare category of books that have been highly praised yet are still somehow underrated.”
—Scott Stossel, editor of
The Atlantic
(The Best Book I Read This Year)
“Highly entertaining and often devastatingly dark.… The Melrose novels are modern masterworks of social comedy.”
—
Bookforum
“Edward St. Aubyn is probably neck-and-neck with Alan Hollinghurst for the title of ‘purest living English prose stylist.’”
—Garth Risk Hallberg,
The Millions (Most Anticipated Books of the Year)
“Why did it take me so long to fall in love with the brilliant novels of Edward St. Aubyn?”
—Bret Easton Ellis
“The Melrose novels are a masterwork for the twenty-first century, written by one of the great prose stylists in England.”
—Alice Sebold, author of
The Lovely Bones
“Hilarious and insightful, with a sinister tint and pitch-perfect dialogue … St. Aubyn’s sentences were the best I read this year.… I’m addicted to St. Aubyn.”
—Elliott Holt, author of
You Are One of Them
“These [novels], covering more than forty years, add up to something incontestably grand, the nearest we have today to the great cycles of upper-class English life published in the decades after the war.”
—
The London Review of Books
“Heartbreaking and delicious.”
—Anthony Bourdain
“Telling someone how much you loved Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels has become something of a cliché, and lately achieves one of two responses: either the remark, ‘Oh, people keep recommending them to me,’ or, more frequently, ‘Yes, aren’t they wonderful?’ which then begins a long, satisfying, somewhat fetishistic conversation about which one of the novels is your favorite, and why.”
—Meg Wolitzer, author of
The Interestings
“Dialogue as amusing as Waugh’s and narrative even more deft than Graham Greene’s.”
—Edmund White
“The bravura quality of St. Aubyn’s performance is irresistible. Brilliant.”
—
The Sunday Telegrap
h (London)
“A master of dark comedy and difficult truths, St. Aubyn is one of contemporary literature’s finest novelists.”
—Bob Edwards
“St. Aubyn is a staggeringly good prose stylist and evidently has a big and open heart.”
—
The Times (London)
“These books are hilarious and terrifying, shot through with pain and wisdom and written in the most extraordinary cold, pure style: rockets of wit exploding like flares to highlight the bleakness of the terrain.”
—
Independent on Sunday (London)
EDWARD ST. AUBYN lives in London with his two children. He is the author of The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, Mother’s Milk, and the final volume of that series, At Last. Mother’s Milk was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006. His most recent novel, Lost for Words, was published in May 2014.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ON THE EDGE. Copyright © 1998 by Edward St. Aubyn. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
St. Aubyn, Edward, 1960–
On the edge: a novel / Edward St. Aubyn.—1st U. S. ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-250-04601-7 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-250-04602-4 (e-book)
1. Man-woman relationships—Fiction. 2. New Age movement—Fiction. 3. Self-realization—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6069.T134O5 2014
23'.914—dc23
2014015668
Originally published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus
First paperback published in Great Britain by Vintage. Reprinted by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, Great Britain
First U.S. Edition: October 2014
eISBN 9781250046024
On the Edge Page 23
