Although the book reads quickly, it becomes bogged down at multiple moments by some needlessly confusing explications of physics principles that lost me completely.

There seemed to be too many characters packed into this relatively short novel. I couldn't keep them straight, but connected most to Francis and Olivia. Benedict Cumberbatch was an excellent reader.

I wish I found this as enjoyable as his other work -- but it's a decidedly lesser work. Funny and quick moving, and his mind is as engaging as ever, but he seemed more interested in the science than the people even as I don't think he did a great job delivering on either.

2 1/2 stars rounded up to 3

This is one of those books that I KNOW is a wonderful, beautifully written book. I appreciated the intelligence of the writing, but ultimately, it just wasn't the book for me. It seemed to drone on about neuroscience, technology, genetics, biology, etc. and I found myself tuning out every time this happened. Again, this isn't the fault of the author and I think this will appeal to many; just not me.

When Lucy moves back to London from the U.S. for a job opportunity, she's excited to reconnect with her friend Olivia. Olivia, a biologist, has just started dating Francis, a conservationist living on and taking care of an estate. I enjoyed seeing Olivia and Francis's budding relationship unfold and how they welcomed Lucy into their lives. However, there was a lot more to the book, including Hunter, Lucy's high-powered young and wealthy boss and avid drug user, many of his associates, Olivia's psychoanalyst father and one of his patients who has schizophrenia, a long-lost estranged brother, and more. Including a couple characters introduced mid-way through the book with no real explanation, which led me to be seriously confused.

I felt like I was slogging through this book and dazing out through parts of it, which only left me more confused and uninterested than before, until I would finally get to a section I enjoyed. In parts, I felt like the author was just trying to display how knowledgeable he was and to share all the random intelligent thoughts he's had. And I found I just didn't care.

To be clear, just because this book wasn't for me, absolutely doesn't mean you won't like it. I can appreciate it for what it is; I just didn't enjoy reading it.

Centered around four main characters, this is the story of friendship and love while in your 30’s. Lucy has just moved to England to run the London office of eccentric billionaire and businessman Hunter. In England she is excited to be close to her best friend Olivia who has just started a relationship with Francis, a naturalist living off the grid.

Early on Lucy gets a horrible diagnosis of brain cancer after suffering leg spasms. Hunter becomes enthralled by Lucy and they eventually start a relationship, and along with Olivia they will do anything to support her.

St. Aubyn, writes so many themes in this book there is a lot to analyze, however in it it’s simplest forms, this is a story of relationships. There is a lot of side characters throughout, that can be a little bit annoying, as I wanted to focus on our four protagonists. Overall I enjoyed this one. I think this would be an excellent book to read in a group setting to breakdown all the elements St. Aubyn is trying to convey.

Thank you NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this advanced copy.

I did not like this book at all. It was way too much, way too dense, and I was bored to tears.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on June 1, 2021

Philosophy, genetics, and mental illness are the building blocks of Double Blind. They rest on the foundation of family, the anchor of all Edward St. Aubyn’s work.

If it is about anything, Double Blind is about relationships. Nature is the setting that informs those relationships — in particular, a country estate called Howorth that has been given over to wilding. If we lived in a state of nature like the deer in Howorth, copulating freely and without attachment might be the natural thing to do. Perhaps it is the natural thing for humans to do when they are not in a relationship, but after relationships form, natural behavior could be too destructive to contemplate. That’s the philosophical question that confounds Francis, whose job is to give tours of Howorth while monitoring the resurgence of species.

Francis’ girlfriend is a biologist named Olivia. Notwithstanding Olivia’s pregnancy, Francis is tempted by Hope’s repeated offers of sex, beginning when they swim together in the nude. Nudity should be natural for Francis. He’s a naturalist who is restoring the cultivated fields of Howorth to their natural state. Nudity seems to be Hope’s preferred state — she sheds her clothing whenever she’s alone with Francis — making temptation, in the form of “grasping at Hope,” a force of nature that Francis struggles to resist.

Another key relationship involves Olivia’s friend Lucy Russell, whose bright future is threatened by a brain tumor. A venture capitalist and fund manager named Hunter Sterling persuaded Lucy to move to London and run a venture capital firm that focuses on science and technology. Since the offer gave Lucy an excuse to leave her rich American boyfriend, not much persuasion was needed. Lucy agrees to stay in Hunter’s London flat while she’s getting situated. Hunter is usually elsewhere, indulging in his cocaine-fueled life of megalomania. Hunter’s “love of power and money had acted as a proxy for love itself” until Lucy gave him cause to alter his perspective.

The final relationship of importance involves Olivia’s adoptive father. Martin Carr is a psychotherapist whose fascination with a schizophrenic patient named Sebastian pushes him toward his ethical boundaries when he begins to suspect that Sebastian, who was also adopted, might be related to Olivia.

An odd but amusing subplot involves the Catholic Church’s relationship with Lucy and Hunter. Lucy is developing a project called Brainwaves. The project scans the brains of people who are in a desirable state of mind and attempts to reconstruct those states in others using trans-cranial magnetic stimulation. A Cardinal has tasked a Franciscan Abbot named Father Guido with making money from a brain scan of “the greatest mystic of modern time.” Using Brainwaves technology, the church plans to market a helmet that will stimulate the mystical centers of the brain by replicating the mystic’s brainwaves. Father Guido provides some comic moments as encounters and inadvertently enjoys a world that is foreign to his ascetic life.

When St. Aubyn isn’t developing relationships, his characters indulge in far-ranging discussions about the mind and the natural world. They talk about mental illness and genetics, the efficacy of psychotherapy, the relationship between socioeconomic status and the mental health diagnosis one is likely to be given, theories surrounding the development of consciousness, the nature of science (“Science is a subset of human nature and not the other way around,” Hunter opines), the tension between determinism and freedom, and the potential of immunotherapy as a cure for cancer. St. Aubyn advances a number of interesting thoughts, including the semantic use of “side effect” to “pretend that among the range of pharmaceutical effects caused by a medicine the undesirable ones were somehow incidental.” I also liked the notion that “experience accuses science of being reductionist and authoritarian, while science dismisses experience as subjective, anecdotal, and self-deceived.”

St. Aubyn tosses out dozens of well-formed thought pearls, many of which would make intriguing essays, but can they sustain a novel? The plot scatters its threads, never weaving them into a tight story. Digressive paragraphs about population biology and genetics go on for pages, interrupting any momentum toward telling a story.

The characters generate enough family drama to sustain two or three novels, but the drama gets lost in the swirl of ideas that St. Aubyn uses as a substitute for storytelling. The plot eventually reaches what seems like an arbitrary stopping point, leaving every thread dangling. The result is disappointing. Working intellectual intrigue into a plot is always welcome, but not at the expense of abandoning the plot, as if the writer realized that none of the stories he started were really worth telling.

And maybe they aren't. Francis' potential affair is hardly groundbreaking fiction, while Martin's therapeutic relationship with a possible relative of his adopted daughter seems a bit contrived. The Brainwaves subplot seems better suited to a science fiction comedy. Maybe St. Aubyn decided to plow all the plot threads under and let the story grow as a wilding in the reader's mind. Only the hapless Abott struck me as an original character, but St. Aubyn has enough talent to have grown his other story fragments into a literary garden if he had set his mind to it.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

This fast-paced galloping novel is an absolute joy to read. Packed with more scientific fact than I have ever allowed into my brain previously, these characters are so blazingly bright and beautiful and a pleasure to spend time with. This is my first encounter with Edward St. Aubyn but it will not be my last. Perfection.

St. Aubyn's Double Booked nd was an interesting assortment of ideas, some quite timely and while I enjoyed it, I wasn't able to connect with the characters as I would have liked.

Not a light read here. Although short, there are large passages with dense rabbit-hole wanderings into neuroscience, biology and other wild ideas mainly put forth by a drug induced mania.

We have several characters: Hunter being a venture capitalist with a penchant for drugs; a couple of friends Olivia and Lucy being reunited in England after Lucy starts working for Hunter. Olivia and Francis just started a love affair. Lucy soon discovers there’s a tumor lodged in her brain. Olivia’s dad works with schizophrenics and the two start working on a project based on the illness and genetics and nurture. We also get one of the patient's story with his neurodivergent thought patterns.

There are many themes in the book and none well developed or resolved, just many huge ideas thrown in and on occasion info dumped into the text of the book. Yet it is held together by the relationships of these people that become more intertwined as the book continues.

Odd enough, I do wish the book had more pages to it, as then the author may have helped some of these themes become more developed or to some conclusions. Although I do get the sense that was the point, to end early and leave it all in the air. This may not satisfy many readers, but some may revel in the complexity.

I enjoyed the previous Dunbar but have been waiting for a juicy sprawling signature novel again. So was delighted to include Double Blind in the June instalment of Novel Encounters, my column highlighting the month's top fiction for Zed, Zoomer magazine’s reading and books section (full review and feature at link).

While a promising premise of intersecting characters - this fell flat for me. It’s like the author was trying so hard to make it into something that was too clever - too dense
- too full of meaning. The characters were, for me, not nuanced nor interesting. A big miss, unfortunately.

Heartfelt thanks to Farrar, Straus and Giroux for a copy of this book.

This was an interesting read. It tells the story of a transformational year for two close friends and their immediate personal and professional circles. Olivia and Lucy are friends from college who are looking forward to reuniting when Lucy returns to London from New York after several years away. Just as she is coming back, their lives are on the cusp of profound personal and career changes in ways that both brings them closer together and dramatically and unexpectedly expands their immediate circles. The book also examines timely issues related to mental health, technology, and the environment.

Recommended!

From the introduction of this Book I was really looking forward to it , but sadly it has to be one of the most dull & boring Books that I have read in a good number of years hence why I have only given it two stars. A very disappointed reader. #NetGalley,#GoodReads,#50 Book Reviews,#Reviews Published,#50 Book Reviews (less)

I'm going to be the odd person out. This is literary fiction to the max and that's fine if you are interested in a novel of ideas but not so much if you like a good plot and characters who resonate. This ostensibly follows three friends throughout a year when one of them- Lucy- is coping with a brain tumor. However, Sr Aubyn has wrapped in issues of metal health, the environment, neuroscience and many other things, which again, would be fine except that it didn't hang together for me. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. A pass from me but his fans should give it a try.

I really enjoyed the way this book was written. It was beautiful to read and just flowed so perfectly. I had a really hard time engaging with the characters though and that made it a tough book to get through. There are so many characters and issues that are going on in this book and while all of the issues are very important and you can tell that they are very important to the author, it makes it just seem like to much is going on throughout the book. There didn't seem to be a very cohesive storyline and it made it really hard to follow. Thank you to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC but all opinions were my own.

Wise and witty, as might be expected, but oddly peopled, with sympathetic characters among stereotypes. In love with science which is often delivered in indigestible slabs. Uneven.

I simply don’t understand why this mess of a book has garnered so much praise. Masquerading as a novel about some very unconvincing and unlikeable characters it seems to be merely a vehicle for St Aubyn to express his ideas about issues he has researched and which he then inserts into the novel in large indigestible chunks with no attempt to integrate them into the narrative. Yes, they are important ideas and issues, and yes, he seems to have some understanding of them – but why not write a series of essays instead? One reviewer encapsulated my thoughts about the book perfectly – pompous pontification. Wish I’d thought of that. Long digressions about epigenetics, schizophrenia, ecology, neuroscience, rewilding are just thrown in and the characters who sometimes express these ideas are neither interesting nor credible. And I’m so tired of reading about high-powered executives and their excessive drug-use and hedonistic life-style – something that St Aubyn seems to find admirable. This attempt at a novel is overwritten, peppered with too many similes and peopled by characters I simply failed to relate to. I can’t help feeling that St Aubyn is living off his reputation as the author of the (overrated) Melrose novels and his publishers haven’t even tried to rein him in.

Edward St. Aubyn is a master wordsmith [Loved the Patrick Melrose novels]. The language did not disappoint.

The setting: back and forth between continents [Europe/London/British countryside and the United States/California] and its [too] numerous characters. Olivia [a biologist]--and her new lover, Francis [a naturalist who lives off the grid]. Olivia's best friend, Lucy [a scientist], newly hired by the tech tycoon Hunter, who has a proclivity for drugs. Lucy's parents--both psychoanalysts--one of his patients, Sebastian, provides another subplot. Add in pregnancy, the Roman Catholic church, cancer/tumors, genetics, drugs, business/science competition, sexual attraction, family, ethics, schizophrenia, and more. Phew.

Many oddball minor characters pop in and out--to wit, Marcel Qing [French/Chinese], Sir William Moorhead, Saul Prokosh, Hope Schwartz, and Father Guido [so strange] and Cardinal Lagerfeld--[another subplot--involving science]. And many strange names for places and projects which I'm sure have double meanings as does the siginficant title.

Some of the phrases just struck me:
"pale radiance of the morning"
"pallid cheerfulness"
"undulation of autumnal hills"
"her body was sinisterly flexible"

A very few instances of humor--much appreciated.

And I had to look up several words: mycorrhizal, aurocs, porphyria, amygdala, to name a few.

3.5 but not rounding up because just too much. And, confession: much of the science parts bored me.

I liked a lot "Patrick Melrose" novels so I was very eager to read this new one but it is an altogether different creature. After finishing it I am still not sure what to think.

In Edward St. Aubyn's most famous novels, his focus was on people and their emotions and feelings, in particular the eponymous Patrick. Here, I have an impression that it is rather a long essay than a proper novel. There are far too many characters to feel a true attachment to any of them, and in some ways, they are rather cliches than potentially existing people - sometimes I had the impression that it is a satire, playing with stereotypes and tropes.

Nevertheless, I liked very much other aspects, because it is full of interesting reflections on ecology, neuroscience, psychology, and other topics - and it is, as always, brilliantly written.

Thanks to the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and NetGalley for the advance copy of this book.