St Aubyn’s characters are no longer cultivating aristocratic detachment but seeking engagement with the world’s problems, albeit while remaining safely within their exclusive social circle.
These post-Melrose characters are just as privileged, attractive and damaged as their more decadent predecessors, and anyone can be made to look frivolous under St Aubyn’s witheringly satirical gaze. His worldview is not exactly heartless, but there is no place for sentiment. There is the possibility of redemption, even if it is almost impossible to attain in this life.

At the centre of Double Blind is the friendship between Lucy and Olivia, two high-achieving thirty-something best friends from Oxbridge student days. Olivia, an epigeneticist who is about to publish a major book in her field, becomes involved with Francis, a naturalist she meets at a conference who has been employed to rewild a country estate polluted by modern farming methods.

Lucy, meanwhile, left academia for the business world and has begun working for Hunter Sterling, an American venture capitalist dedicated to commercially exploiting new technologies and the personal consumption of large amounts of cocaine. She has just rejected a marriage proposal from Nathan, the devoted but boring heir to one of America’s largest fortunes, and has been diagnosed with a brain tumour.

Gradually, Olivia and Francis are drawn into the orbit of the charismatic Sterling and his super-rich American friends, while back in England Olivia’s psychoanalyst father begins treating Sebastian, a schizophrenia patient with whom he may have a secret family connection. We learn that Olivia herself was adopted, which helps to explain why she studied biology at university.

The great preoccupation of St Aubyn’s fiction is inheritance in all its aspects, and to that extent Double Blind is of a piece with the Melrose novels. This may not be the author’s best book, but this upscale social comedy-drama is entertaining as well as companionable.