Between 1992 and 2011 Edward St Aubyn published a sequence of five short, brilliantly funny and biting novels about an alter-ego called Patrick Melrose, taking him from a small boy, sexually abused by his father in the South of France, through to adulthood and his attempts to survive this experience, first through drink and drug addiction, then by gradually coming to some terms with it, following the deaths first of his father, then of his addled, foolish mother, and through becoming a parent himself. The Melrose sequence is one of the really notable achievements of contemporary British fiction and, given that it is closely based on St Aubyn’s own traumatic experience, an act of courage too.

If you haven’t read it yet, you’ve really missed out. It’s quite possible that you haven’t, though, for it is still not yet as widely known as it deserves to be. That seemed to be about to change when, in 2006, the longest and perhaps the best instalment, Mother’s Milk, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

The novel won St Aubyn a larger readership than he had enjoyed before, selling some 120,000 copies — but it didn’t win the Booker, which would have transformed his fortunes far more radically. The prize went instead to the splashy, overwritten, under-structured Indian saga The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. It was an injustice, a  ridiculous choice, even.

One of the judges, Anthony Quinn, who had supposed St Aubyn would win as he wanted, wrote a couple of years later: “It’s not an exaggeration to say I felt sick to my stomach. I was pleased for Kiran Desai … but we chose the wrong book.”

But then the Booker, like most other literary prizes, so often gets it wrong. Arundhati Roy, DBC Pierre, Ben Okri, Keri Hulme, Aravind Adiga all won, Muriel Spark never. During my own Buggins’ turn as a judge, I consented to John Banville’s The Sea winning over Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.

Most writers manage to shrug their shoulders and swallow their disappointment — although the often shortlisted Julian Barnes had taken to jeering at the Booker as “posh bingo” before he finally won with The Sense of an Ending in 2011.

Edward St Aubyn, however, has taken direct action. On May 8 he is publishing his first novel since concluding the Melrose sequence — and Lost for Words is a long-overdue, laugh-out-loud satire on the whole business of literary prizes. It’s been circulating in proof among the literati for some months and at every shindig this year it’s been the book most discussed. St Aubyn’s fans (rumoured to include the actress Kristin Scott Thomas) are captivated by it.

“The Elysian Prize” is sponsored by “a highly innovative but controversial agricultural company… a leader in the field of genetically modified crops, crossing wheat with Arctic cod to make it frost resistant, or lemons with bullet ants to give them extra zest”. Elysian’s “weaponized agricultural agents” are controversial but “from the general public’s point of view, Elysian’s name continued to be associated almost entirely with its literary prize”.

Chair of the prize judges is a back-bench MP whose “moment in the pallid  Caledonian sun as Under-Secretary of State for Scotland had been the climax of his career so far”. His panel includes  a well-known columnist, Jo Cross, whose ruling passion is “relevance”;  Penny Feathers, a former Foreign Office dogsbody who has taken to writing dreadful thrillers with the assistance of an advanced word-processing programme, “Gold Ghost Plus”;  an Oxbridge academic interested in “good writing”;  and an actor called Tobias Benedict who doesn’t make it to the meetings but sends handwritten cards saying he’s  there “in spirit if not in flesh”.

They make a fantastic hash of the job, mostly of course because they haven’t actually read the books they are discussing — and St Aubyn delights in parodying the dreadful novels that make it on to their shortlist. Favourite is a sub-Irvine Welsh effusion, wot u starin at, beginning “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” which the chairman backs because it “really hit the spot when it came to new voices, the real concerns of ordinary people, and the dark underbelly of the Welfare State”.

There’s the Shakespearian novel, All the World’s a Stage, by the young New Zealander, Hermione Fade, which begins: “‘William!’ ‘Ben!’  ‘Do you know Thomas Kyd and John Webster?’ ‘Lads,’ said William, giving the men a friendly nod.”

Penny Feathers likes this one because it makes her feel she really is in a tavern with William Shakespeare and his pals. “That was the wonderful thing about historical novels, one met so many famous people. It was like reading a very old copy of Hello! magazine.”

Then there’s The Greasy Pole by Alastair Mackintosh, “the story of a  working-class lad from the Highlands who goes into politics and, without giving the plot away, ends up becoming Prime Minister of Britain, which was a remarkable achievement”.

But the real stinger are the two Indian novels in contention. One, The Mulberry Elephant, about his own glorious family history, is the magnum opus of Sonny, the insanely rich and haughty “six hundred and fifty-third maharaja of Badanpur”.  But the killer is a volume by his equally grand auntie, The Palace Cookbook by Lakshmi Badanpur, “full of wonderful anecdotes, family portraits and recipes that have been jealously guarded for centuries”, taken down from an illiterate cook by her secretary.

The cookbook is submitted for the Elysian Prize in error — but some of the judges really take to it. Tobias Benedict weighs in by saying, “I loved the chicken curry with lime and cardamom.” Jo Cross can’t but agree. “It’s important that it works at a ‘realistic’ level, while simultaneously operating as the boldest metafictional performance of our time,” she enthuses.  Total disaster ensues.

Broad stuff? Yes. But is St Aubyn, who has presumably never been a judge himself, being ridiculously unfair to the way our great literary prizes operate? No. Not one of those who has experienced being a judge with whom I have discussed Lost for Words has been able to say so. Prize it — it deserves it.

Lost for Words by Edward St Aubyn is published by Picador at £12.99 on May 8.
Product Details

Lost for Words: A Novel by Edward St. Aubyn (May 20, 2014)