''Mother's Milk'', Edward St Aubyn

Well, it’s a last minute contender for books of 2006. Following a trawl through the newspaper Christmas recommendation lists (see below) I thought I would give Edward St Aubyn’s book a go, although I had previously dismissed it when it was nominated for the Booker. I am very fickle when it comes to choosing books – the stuffy sounding name was enough to put me off. But thanks be to Zoe Williams in G2 for pushing me on.

‘’Mother’s Milk’’ is narrated by a 5 year-old boy (and subsequently, 6 and 7 year-old), and, on occasion, his baby brother, over the period of three summers. It opens with the boy describing being born, which narration, we discover, was prompted by the birth of his baby brother. So far, so weird. To make it more strange, in retrospect, is that this is a pretty mature first person narrator; at the very least, more mature than 5 years old. And yet, somehow, it works. A classy version of ‘’Look Who’s Talking’’, if you will. Now I’m looking back at it I start to find faults with the approach but whilst I was reading it, it was very absorbing, and no real difference versus other books with various narrative voices.

Interestingly (and this seems to happen a lot to me; my mother will reassure it’s just my Reticular Activating System kicking in) I watched a film last night which dealt, in a way, with some similar issues: ‘Unknown White Male’. It’s a documentary about a 38 year old British stockbroker living in New York who was suddenly hit by retrograde amnesia, completely losing all the memories he’d ever had (although not his procedural memory, so he could still talk, read, write, drive a car and so on). He was left with adult faculties but with a newborn baby’s view of the world, and started experiencing everything for the first time – the first time he ate an apple, the first time he saw the sea and so on. A couple of people in the film commented to him that he was ‘lucky’ to be able to re-build his life from scratch, to not be burdened with any emotional baggage, to be able to choose who his friends would be. But throughout he seemed more bewildered and philosophical, questioning quite what his identify was or could be, and by the end actually hoping that he wouldn’t recover his memory for fear that it would then erase the ‘new’ him.

I would have some deep existential comment to make at this point were I to know any rudimentary philosophy, but I don’t, so I will just look pensively into the distance and go ‘’hmmm, interesting’’.