Seeking distraction from the clamour of apocalyptic propaganda about "heatwaves" and "droughts" in August (when, surprise, surprise, it was, for once, hot and dry), I bought a secondhand paperback copy of Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes for 20p. At that price, I wasn't worried about losing money if it turned out to be pot-boiling rubbish. To my delight, it turned out in fact to be a diverting and enjoyable read. I was still in a world dominated by doom sayers but at least I was being entertained.
The novel is told in the first person and concerns a quest, which the narrator is asked to fulfil at the start of the book by Damian, a dying ex-friend. The two have not seen one another since a couple of years after they were both part of the already declining party season to bring young women out into English society. The two men's relationship was ruined by a dinner party in the late 1960s at which something supposedly dreadful happened (although, when the reader finally discovers what that actually was, it turns out not to have been as dreadful as all that).
Damien, a parvenu introduced into the world of debutantes by the narrator, has since become very, very rich. Realising that he is dying and having received an anonymous letter that indicates he has a child somewhere, born as the result of a liaison at that earlier time in his life, he asks the narrator to track down the various women who might be the child's mother, to find out whether they gave birth to a child that is his. He hopes that a child belonging to him will be found so that he can leave his fortune to his own flesh and blood.
This sounds far-fetched put so baldly, but Julian Fellowes is a skilful writer and his gifted tale-telling persuades the reader to keep going, if not necessarily to suspend credibility completely. The plot, although a reasonably enthralling one, is really only the framework for a detailed recollection of a way of life that no longer exists.
From the book's opening passage you know what you are getting - an elegy to youth and a vanished world:
"London is a haunted city for me now and I am the ghost that haunts it. As I go about my business every street or square or avenue seems to whisper of an earlier, different era in my history. The shortest trip round Chelsea or Kensington takes me by some door where once I was welcome but where today I am a stranger. I see myself issue forth, young again and dressed for some long forgotten frolic, tricked out in what looks like the national dress of a war-torn Balkan country. Those flapping flares, those frilly shirts with their footballers' collars - what were we thinking of? And as I watch, beside that wraith of a younger, slimmer me walk the shades of the departed, parents, aunts and grandmothers, great-uncles and cousins, friends and girlfriends, gone now from this world entirely, or at least from what is left of my own life."
I was born in Kensington and spent a lot of my childhood in Chelsea; like the narrator, for me there are doors in the neighbourhood where "once I was welcome but where today I am a stranger", because those I knew have long gone, replaced by members of the new super rich who have sent the prices in the area skyrocketing out of the reach of the merely comfortable. These factors made the book particularly appealing for me as a form of nostalgia. However, even when the action of the book moved away from London and events began to take place mostly around the home counties, with a brief detour to Los Angeles, I still remained glued.
The sense that lies beneath Fellowes's best known work, Downton Abbey - that, for all its flaws, beauty was intrinsic to the old order of English society, what one might call "the establishment" - is everywhere evident in this book. While Fellowes doesn't say that things ought to have stayed exactly as they were and does recognise the many unpleasant aspects of what has been swept away, he also mourns the lost grace contained in earlier social traditions. Even if the rituals of the past were designed to some extent to be exclusive, he suggests they had value. While making no attempt to disguise the fact that most of the people who made up what was then society were unexciting bores or boors, he raises the possibility that the structure itself was somehow valuable. It imposed exacting standards and insisted on manners and, given the decline in manners and the rise in violence since, he seems to wonder whether it is possible that it might have been worth preserving, if only until we worked out how to replace it with something better, rather than something more shabby.
That new shabbiness is conjured up well by Fellowes some way into the book, when he has his narrator come across a now not unusually Hogarthian scene in the same part of London in which he had enjoyed his scenes of gilded youth:
"I had just turned off Gloucester Road into Hereford Square when there was a scream, then laughter, then shouting, then the sound of someone being sick. I wish I could write that I was astonished to hear what sounded like a large Indian takeaway being splashily deposited onto the pavement, but these days it would require a Martian, and one only recently arrived from outer space, to be surprised at these charming goings-on. A group of young men and women in their early twenties, I would guess, were loitering on the corner of the square, perhaps recent refugees from the Hereford Arms on the other side of the road, but perhaps not. One woman, in a short leather skirt and trainers, was throwing up and another was tending to her. The rest just stood around, waiting for the next act in their evening's entertainment."
As the narrator goes on to observe:
"Until as little as ten years ago being drunk was a mistake, a regrettable by-product of making merry, a miscalculation which, the next day, required an apology. Now it's the point...At times it is hard not to feel that as a culture we are lost, in permanent denial and spinning in the void."
This concern I think is the author's real reason for writing the book. Fellowes has a wonderful turn of phrase and a good deal of wisdom when looking at his fellow creatures, but at heart he is preoccupied by questions about progress and where change is taking us and whether perpetual social revolution is destructive or not.
Thus, on learning that the father of an old friend decided he was gay as he reached the age of retirement, he asks himself (and the reader) whether such apparent liberation has actually improved anything, including the man's life:
"I was struck, for the millionth time, by the personal convolutions required by our new century. Would it have occurred to Jeff Vitkov, nice, boring, old Jeff, the brilliant entrepreneur and family man, to question his sexuality when he had got well into his fifties in any other period but our own? If he had been born even twenty years earlier, he would just have taken up golf, seen a bit more of the chaps at the club and not given the matter another thought. Would he have been any worse off?"
I am making the novel sound like a boring social treatise, but nothing could be further from the truth. Fellowes is funny and writes well, evoking scenes in the reader's mind's eye with ease. When he describes one character as having "one of those flat faces, like a carnival mask that had been dropped in the road and run over by a heavy lorry" and goes on to sum him up as a man who "had been defeated by our 'interesting times'", for whom a "hand-to-mouth existence lay ahead, of inheriting a cottage from a cousin and trying to rent it out, of hoping he would be remembered when the last aunt bit the dust, of wondering if his children might manage a little something for him on a regular basis", he makes it almost impossible not to imagine the fellow.
He is also astute. When a female character pours out her soul to the narrator, she finishes by apologetically commenting, "I don't know why I told you all that". "Because I was interested", Fellowes has the narrator reply, before explaining to the reader:
"Actually, this is quite true. Especially in England. Very few Englishmen ever ask women anything about themselves. They choose instead to lecture their dinner neighbours on a new and better route to the M5, or to praise their own professional achievements."
The one thing Fellowes omits in these observatons is that above all topics the rural upper middle class Englishman likes to lecture dinner companions on the state of his boiler, but never mind, he gets so much else right, providing, for example, the perceptive observation that "There is a tyranny that forces people of a certain class to insist they are only happy in the country". He is wonderfully against the nanny-state, pointing out that "to encourage the surrender of freedom in order to avoid danger is the hallmark of a tyranny and always a poor exchange."
Following the very recent death of the Queen, the narrator's thoughts on Her Majesty and the younger members of her family seem especially apposite:
While the younger members of the Royal Family talk about mental health and their views on whatever comes into their heads, "only Her Majesty", he says, "by never being interviewed, by never revealing an opinion, has retained a genuine mystery."
The book is tremendously enjoyable and very intelligent. For me the modern mystery is why literature that is easy to read and pleasurable is scorned and sneered at, as if it were easy to write such stuff and wrong to be delighted, when you ought to be made to work. I suppose the Roundheads never really went away.
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