95. Past Imperfect, Julian Fellowes
I don't know if this was as truly awful as I think it was. Maybe there is a level of subtle satire to it that I missed. Or maybe it's just awful.
The premise is crappy. for a start. An incredibly rich dying man calls on someone described by the blurb as "his sworn enemy" to find out who wrote him an anonymous letter many years ago suggesting that he might have fathered a child. The "sworn enemy" is our unnamed first-person narrator, and his completely unbelievable quest involves contacting a number of women that he and Mr Rich knew when they were young posh boys doing The Season together in the late 60s.
Fellowes has written an afterword to this book in which he talks about themes of time passing, social change, the many lives that one lives within a life. What he actually seems to have written is a book about how much nicer it was to be a rich white man in the old days than it is now.
There are zero gay people or people of colour in this book - the last maybe understandable given the time and social setting, but in a sizeable group of friends it seems rather odd that they are all straight. As a social history this would have been so much richer for the addition of some characters whose lives were not wonderful and easy back in the lovely, lovely olden days.
Speaking of which, women. Through the eyes of Fellowes' narrator, women are either beautiful goddesses (if they're beautiful AND posh then they are pretty much actually divine and he hyperventilates in their presence) or fat/frumpy/common embarrassments. It's unclear how much of the misogyny is Fellowes' own, and how much he has put on in his guise as narrator. The book rightly recognises the limited choices open to upper class women in the late 60s - the lack of proper education, the parental pressure to marry well, the failure of anyone to consider a career as an option, and (as this is a main part of the "plot") the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy. However, the blame for this is put at the feet either of the women themselves or of their mothers - they are unhappy because they chased the wrong man, or because their mothers were too pushy. And they suffer, and the narrator looks on with patronising sympathy.
There's a lot of tedious harrumphing about social change. For example, here is our narrator giving his opinion about the fact that is was OK back then to fit too many passengers into a taxi:
They [the "powers that be"] weren't concerned with micro-managing our lives, as they are today, and in this I think, indeed I know, that we were happier for it. Some changes have been improvements, on some the jury is still out, but when it comes to the constant, meddling interventions by the state, we were much, much better off than we are now. Of course, there were times when we were at risk, and the smug, would-be-controllers will tut-tut at that, but to encourage the surrender of freedom in order to avoid danger is the hallmark of tyranny and always a poor exchange
It felt, a lot of the time, like being stuck in a lift with Jacob Rees-Mogg and that is not an experience I would wish on anyone.
On the plus side, there were some interesting bits of detail of the lives of posh people in the later part of the 20th century. I didn't know, for example, that it was (maybe still is - this is definitely not my milieu) the custom when having a house party to farm out groups of guests to other local families who will give them a bed and a dinner before the main party (although not, it seems, attending the party themselves, or having houses grand enough to host such a party and thereby need the favour returned. Is there anything in it for them, or do the big house people just get away with it because they are lords of the manor? Who knows?)
My favourite review on Goodreads is the one written by Kate, and the wonderful line "Well you can fuck off from my tombola stall, Julian Fellowes, that’s for damn sure.". Amen to that.
www.goodreads.com/book/show/2392839.Past_Imperfect