Book Club

Week one: imitation

Michael Cunningham's novel has an epigraph from Virginia Woolf's diary entry for 30 August 1923, when she was at work on her fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway. This work in progress still has her provisional title, "The Hours", which Cunningham has duly taken for his own book. It is the first sign of his activity of imitation. In the prologue of The Hours we are asked to imagine, as if from her point of view, the day of Virginia Woolf's suicide. But this is not a fictionalisation of her life and death; it is an imitation – a reworking – of her novel, Mrs Dalloway.

The prologue is followed by a second section, titled "Mrs Dalloway", in which a 52-year-old woman called Clarissa Vaughan goes shopping for flowers in New York on a June morning at "the end of the twentieth century". Woolf's novel begins with a woman called Clarissa Dalloway leaving her London house on a June morning to buy flowers for a party. Has Cunningham's character not noticed, you feel like asking, that she is acting out the opening of a famous novel? She certainly knows Woolf's fiction. Her friend Richard has even dubbed her "Mrs Dalloway", scorning her own itch to be likened to a heroine from Tolstoy or Henry James. Her "existing first name", he suggests, is "a sign too obvious to ignore". And anyway, she is no tragic protagonist, but a woman, like Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway, "destined to charm, to prosper".

We follow Clarissa Vaughan, walking through the streets of New York, as Woolf's narrative followed Clarissa Dalloway. Woolf's protagonist passes a man called Scrope Purvis, and we suddenly catch his thoughts, as if they were some briefly audible skein of sound. ("a touch of the bird about her, of the jay, blue-green, light, vivacious, though she was over fifty"). In The Hours, Clarissa is spotted at the corner of Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue by Willie Bass, who more bluntly considers her "certain sexiness" ("She must have been spectacular twenty-five years ago") and then, as the light changes, walks on, unnoticed by her.

There are little jokes for the reader who knows the original. Woolf's protagonist is at the florist's when she is startled by a car backfiring ("oh! A pistol shot in the street outside!"). In the back of the car passers-by glimpse "a face of the greatest importance". "Was it the Prince of Wales's, the Queen's, the Prime Minister's?" (The prime minister will later arrive as a guest at the party for which Clarissa Dalloway is preparing.) Cunningham's character is distracted from her purchase in a flower shop by a loud noise from the street, where filming is taking place, and the sudden appearance from a trailer of a well know profile "(Meryl Streep? Vanessa Redgrave?)".

Yet the novel has two other narrative threads. In the next section "It is a suburb of London. It is 1923", and Virginia Woolf is thinking about how she might begin the novel that she is supposed to be writing. At the end of it she writes the first sentence of that novel. There it is. "Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." And then that sentence, repeated, opens the next section of the novel (titled "Mrs Brown"), as Laura Brown, a housewife in Los Angeles in 1949, reads Mrs Dalloway to herself. The narrative focusing on her includes long passages from Woolf's novel, laid out on the page in italic font.

Cunningham gives you every chance to hear his echoes of Woolf's style: the whimsical similes, the rueful parentheses, the luminous circumstantial detail. And the narrative method is a homage to Woolf's novel. Each section imitates Mrs Dalloway by being restricted to the events of a single day, and follows the stream of one consciousness, only to leave it, for a sentence or a paragraph, for another. Though each section of Cunningham's novel concentrates on one of its three leading characters, the narrative can always shift between different consciousnesses. As Virginia Woolf talks to her husband Leonard, we suddenly enter his mind too ("She may be the most intelligent woman in England, he thinks"). As Laura Brown makes a cake with her son, we inhabit his mind as well as hers ("He understands that he's expected to dump the flour into the bowl but it seems possible that he's misunderstood the directions, and will ruin everything").

The Clarissa Vaughan sections go further: they parallel the episodes and the characters of Woolf's original. Septimus Warren Smith, the shell-shock victim in Woolf's story who hears the birds in Regent's Park speaking in Greek, becomes Clarissa's one-time lover Richard, dying from Aids, who is haunted by spirits singing "in a foreign language. I believe it may have been Greek". If you have read Mrs Dalloway, you will guess how Richard's story might end. Yet plot is incidental.

Imitation is fitting because Woolf's original novel was trying to do justice to the sharpness of new experience, even as it detonates old memories, and this endeavour is always worth trying afresh.

John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Join him and Michael Cunningham for a discussion on Tuesday 5 July at 7pm, Hall Two, Kings Place, 90 York Way, London N1. Tickets £8, from www.kingsplace.co.uk (020 7520 1490).

• Michael Cunningham
• Fiction
• Virginia Woolf

Week four: readers' responses

When he came to the Guardian book club to speak about his novel Mother's Milk, Edward St Aubyn agreed with one of his readers that his very titles have a certain grim humour. He claimed that his latest, At Last, was a joke for his impatient publisher ("At last, a novel by Edward St Aubyn"). But he acknowledged too that all his titles rely on sardonic ambiguity. Some Hope, the title of the first of his novels about the Melrose family, means either that there is hope or, in the way the idiom is usually spoken, that there is no hope at all. Mother's Milk is about the sustenance – and the poison – of a mother's influence. Such ambiguity seemed to characterise the novel's comedy, funnelled through the desperate, intelligent protagonist, Patrick Melrose.

Patrick may be "flawed", as one reader said, but he is also "enjoyable and entertaining, and we are very much on his side". However, he worried that some of his "targets", such as Margaret, the wonderfully appalling nanny, or Seamus, the new age charlatan to whom Patrick's mother gives her house, are "slightly easy". Perhaps it was not hard enough for Patrick to score points against such foes?

The novelist did not dispute the ghastliness of such characters, but disagreed that they were Patrick's "targets". It is true that Patrick is very irritated by people such as the Packers, the hosts of a gruesome lunch party in St Tropez, but then "he is very irritated by everything". And anyway, he is hardly exempt from mockery. The author believed that there was in his fiction "a democracy of entrapment. Everyone is trapped in their personality".

The characters are eloquently trapped, in their thoughts as well as their dialogue. St Aubyn discussed his decision to narrate the first section of the novel from the point of view of five-year-old Robert Melrose, but in a vocabulary more advanced than he would possess. A contributor to the book club website objected to the technique. "Are we to believe that five-year-old Robert is aware of the reality of childhood amnesia; conscious that he can't be remembering, and so inferring that he must be imagining? If imagining, where has he gained such detailed knowledge of the messy reality of childbirth? No, the author is giving young Robert a memory, and, unless it is another anti-realist trick, it rings false." In discussion, the author conceded that he was not interested in mimicking ordinary inarticulacy. Eloquence was a way of showing how trapped a character was.

Writers who come to the book club are often asked about their processes of writing, but few have given such a rigorous account of its rigours as St Aubyn. Getting sentences well turned is clearly his obsession. His description of the interminable editing process by which "something quite bad" was turned into a finished product had anyone with creative writing impulses wincing. One listener was prompted to wonder whether this account of the author as self-editor could possibly leave anything for another editor to do. "Do you allow any editing by your publisher at all?" Only in terms of "polish – when I think things are polished and I'm wrong". Though he admitted that he was a "control freak", he agreed with another reader that there came a point quite often when rewriting was making things worse – when he found himself "disimproving" sentences. And then he had to stop.

St Aubyn was keen that we treat Mother's Milk as a self-contained novel, but there were several readers who looked back to earlier volumes in what has become, with the recent publication of At Last, a five-volume roman-fleuve. One reader pointed to a connection between the narrative perspective of the five-year-old Robert at the beginning of Mother's Milk and that of the five-year-old Patrick at the beginning of Some Hope, terrorised and sexually abused by his tyrannical father. Another was amazed to find that he had made it to marriage and paternity, however troubled. "I'm very glad that he has survived after what happens to him in New York after he goes to pick up the remains of his father," he commented, recalling Patrick's terrifying drug binge in New York in Bad News, the second volume of the sequence.

But discussion also reached forward to the sequel to Mother's Milk. St Aubyn talked of his fiction being concerned essentially with whether characters could be free. A reader who said she was struck by this concern spoke of Patrick Melrose's struggles to act voluntarily, and how destructive these struggles were.

Comparing Patrick's family history to some of the chronicles of abuse within families with which she had dealt professionally, she wondered about the complicity of other characters. Patrick understood that his father had been a monster, but what about his mother, over whose dwindling condition he agonises in Mother's Milk? What was her responsibility? In his reply, St Aubyn was able to combine psychological analysis with a recommendation of his new book. In At Last, "luckily, all these questions are answered". In this novel, he said, "the question of her collaboration and Patrick's sense of having been a toy within his parents' sadomasochistic relationship is explored thoroughly – and it will be just down your street".

John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Next week he will be looking at The Hours by Michael Cunningham.

• Edward St Aubyn

Week three: On writing Mother's Milk

When I completed Some Hope, my trilogy about the unhappy Melroses, I thought I had finished with that fictional family for ever. Feeling relatively carefree for a while, I wrote two other novels with entirely different themes and settings. Then, at the beginning of this century, the dawning of the Age of Terror, I was drawn back into family themes by the birth of my son and by my mother's descent into dementia. I became overwhelmingly aware of the non-verbal realms of consciousness. My son had not yet learned to speak and my mother could no longer speak, and I (who might be accused of speaking too much) was drawn again and again into imagining what sort of experience they were having. Ever since I "did" TS Eliot for A- level, I had been impressed by his description of poetry as a "raid on the inarticulate". The "inarticulate" in Some Hope had been the secrecy and taboo surrounding incest and addiction, but here was the thing itself: experience that could not be articulated by the people who were having it. The effort to imagine a mind without language, like that of the newborn Thomas, or clinging on to language with her faint but imperious pencil-written notes, like the almost speechless Eleanor, was the "raid" that turned into Mother's Milk.

And yet I still didn't realise that I had a Melrose novel on my hands. Respecting the completeness of Some Hope, I dutifully invented a new set of characters, or at least a new set of names. The protagonist was called Mark, and if the novel had remained essentially about speechlessness, he might have kept his name, but the drama of disinheritance introduced a French house into Mother's Milk indistinguishable from the Melrose house in Some Hope. Mark's mother also turned out to be a compulsive philanthropist strangely reminiscent of Eleanor Melrose. In Some Hope Eleanor drunkenly writes a cheque to the Save the Children Fund, in dim recognition that children need to be saved, even if the one she has in her care cannot be. In Mother's Milk the philanthropist has become more fundamentalist and wants to give all her money to a charity that cannot do any good to anyone, except its director, Seamus Dourke.

Evidence against the novelty of the characters and setting of Mother's Milk was piling up, but I only admitted that it was a Melrose novel after I had finally finished writing it. Always rather technologically incompetent, I tried to turn Mark into Patrick with the "change all" function on my computer. Sadly I made some kind of mistake, with the result that characters were now going to the "superpatricket" and saying things like "Patrick my words". Eleanor, as she now was, had "puncture patricks" on her arms when she was visited in hospital by her son. Although I had rather more "Patrick" than I had bargained for, I knew I had made the right decision, only marvelling at how long it had taken to make.

Inspired by my recognition that Mother's Milk was a Melrose novel, I decided that I should write a second, maternal trilogy to balance the paternal trilogy of Some Hope. Last summer I finished what was supposed to be the second part of the second trilogy, but again I turned out to be wrong. With annoying consequences for my fine symmetrical plan, I realised that At Last was the end of the story of Patrick Melrose's upbringing and his quest to become free from its destructive consequences. There was no need for a third volume.

I am trying to acknowledge rather than exaggerate the role of inspiration, receptiveness and patience in writing a novel. Of course art thrives on control and lucidity, but the imagination often throws out these Apollonian virtues. This is true for me on the large scale of organising a series of related novels and also on the small scale of organising a sentence. Metaphors are the part of writing where the imagination is in its freest state. They lay claim to correspondences between things that are not linked in the ordinary world, and so no amount of ordinary research can uncover them. They cannot be willed into existence but have to arise spontaneously. A lot of the time my expectations have turned out to be wrong, and I have had to wait, close to desperation, for the next bit of a novel to reveal itself. On the other hand, I sometimes have the impression of eavesdropping on certain passages of dialogue, and feel that images have turned up of their own accord.

Still, whatever the balance between the conscious and unconscious elements in making a novel, I have now, at last, finished with the Melroses and their unexpected quintet. Or so it seems.

Next week John Mullan will be looking at readers' responses.

• Edward St Aubyn