Edward St Aubyn: The Patrick Melrose novels; 2. Bad News

Just the first few chapters but more dynamic and immediately engaging. Patrick M now front and centre.
This is the equivalent of Darren Aronofsky's film Requiem for a Dream where the horror, the ecstasy and the obsessive drive about drug addiction are so superbly and vividly conveyed.
Now finished.
I like the short chapters which fit very well with the richly evocative adjective-heavy descriptions that so powerfully and often repulsively convey the world that Patrick M inhabits...both the physical world and his mental, drug-fuelled one.
Patrick is a figure at once pathetic, weirdly admirable ( in the way he is so totally self-absorbed) and repulsive. And, irony of ironies, there is much in him that is very similar to his own father. I wonder to what extent he is aware of this. Hardly at all I suspect. Relationships mean nothing. There is no evidence of any real relationship with a person/people in this book I think...