It seems lately the only fiction that holds my interest is the stuff I can't understand. So this was very interesting! Charlie Fairburn has six months to live, and he decides to spend it writing a novel about the meaning of consciousness while supporting the Monaco gambling habit of Angelique, his luscious girlfriend. The characters in Charlie's novel, Patrick, Crystal and Jean-Paul, sit on a train stalled in fog and discuss metaphysics, neuroscience and the mind/brain split as Charlie approaches his fevered end. Apparently some (or all) of these characters have appeared in St. Aubyn's The Complete Patrick Melrose Novels.
Full of deep meaning or perhaps not much meaning at all - hard for me to say. But worth it for the rich store of lovely, witty, delicately-balanced sentences such as: "Eccentricity was the natural and in itself cliched protest of slaughtered individuals" and "...if you jump out a window, you can always tell when you've reached the ground."
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