St Aubyn is regularly likened to Evelyn Waugh — the same social milieu, the same haute tartness. Mother's Milk somewhat dashed those comparisons with its excessive whimsy (it opened with Patrick's five-year-old son's recollections of his own birth). At Last blends the bitter with the sweet far more effectively, and draws on a powerful tenderness that has matured over the series. 

Despite its gothic horror, it has evolved into a meditation on a universal conundrum: how we come to be who we are, and what scope there is for change. Freedom is its enduring dream — freedom from ancestral baggage and the snares of drink and drugs, bad relationships and false gods. For Patrick, middle-aged and newly orphaned, it finally seems a possibility. 

But these novels tell another story, too — the story of a writer's recovery. Back when he was promoting the trilogy, St Aubyn let slip that the darkest spectres of Patrick's life — the abusive father, the tangos with addiction, the suicidal urges — were plucked directly from his own experience. Reviewers who had already been remarking upon his aristocratic pedigree and titled friends began to peer more closely at the pages he had sweated over, trying to tease the fact from the fiction. 

Ultimately though, St Aubyn's biography doesn't change the way we read his work. Its excellence sees to that. As he told one probing interviewer: "If it does have any therapeutic value, the only way to get access to it is to write without any therapeutic intent. You transform experience into, for want of a better word, art." 

The immediacy that readers crave from pulp misery memoirs is here in abundance, but mediated by skill and wisdom and insight — by artistry, in short — it also becomes something that will endure.