The aristos flock to a party. The brownies are spiked with hashish.
Anyone who has seen “Gosford Park” (2001) knows that Julian Fellowes, the movie’s screenwriter, has a knack for mocking the foibles of the British upper crust. In his novel “Snobs” (2005) he skewered the inhabitants of the same milieu even more savagely. “Past Imperfect” shows Mr. Fellowes’s satirical talents to be undiminished. Here, though, he offers a rounded portrait of an aristocratic gratin fighting to preserve its customs and defend its turf.
Mr. Fellowes chooses his moment carefully—precisely a decade after Queen Elizabeth II had summarily ended the ceremonies at which young ladies were presented at court. Until 1958, this rite of passage was the sine qua non for debutantes. How, in the new dispensation, were aristocratic parents (and parvenus) going to marry off their progeny? “Past Imperfect” offers a portrait of Society in 1968, unwilling to yield to democratic norms and fighting to retain its habits and mores.
The effort now centers on a charity ball held at—how the mighty have fallen!—a hotel, albeit a grand one on London’s fashionable Park Lane. “There was hardly a parent there,” Mr. Fellowes writes of the event, “who thought their daughters’ future would be anything more than an extended repeat of their own present. How can they have been so secure in their expectations? Didn’t it occur to them that more change might be on its way? After all, their generation had lived through enough of it to push the world off its axis.”
The novel’s whirl of parties and dances takes place in London’s fabled Swinging Sixties, and some of the era’s telltale iconography makes an appearance. The first-person narrator, a student at Cambridge at the time and now recalling his youth, notes that part of British culture in the 1960s was “about pop and drugs and happenings, and Marianne Faithfull and Mars Bars and free love.” But another part looked back to a traditional England, “where behaviour was laid down according to the practice of, if not many centuries, at least the century immediately before, where everything from clothes to sexual morality was rigidly determined and, if we did not always obey the rules, we knew what they were.”
The view of this social class in “Past Imperfect” is often less than flattering. By the late 1960s, its members are nervous about their status, toying with “the new” and, as ever, eager for the money to keep up appearances. The men still dress in white tie, and even know when it is right to wear it, though ever fewer people care. Other customs threaten to fall away. A debutante attempts to attend the races at Ascot but is forbidden admission because she is—shockingly—wearing trousers. She decides to remove them on the spot, sending nearby photographers into a frenzy. “I suppose I can come in now,” she says calmly to the bow-tied gateman. “I suppose you can,” he answers. Later in the story, an American heiress—the family’s name is Vitkov—arrives in London and tries to crash London society by renting Madame Tussauds, of all places. The aristos flock to her party even so, consuming the brownies that are handed around without quite grasping, until it is too late, that they have been spiked with hashish by a spiteful guest.
The novel’s narrator, a member of the aristocratic class himself, is aware of its foolish side but cannot feel happy about what eventually comes to replace the old order. He observes that a new and affluent group is now living the high life, but its members “do not, unlike their predecessors a century ago, take much responsibility for those less blessed. This new breed feel no heed to lead the public in public.”
Mr. Fellowes, it should be said, is not merely committing sociology in “Past Imperfect.” He offers a narrative crowded with incident and memorable characters. The device by which he builds his story—a dying billionaire entrusts the narrator with a quest to discover which one of a half-dozen ladies gave birth to his only heir—is a trifle contrived. But it does give Mr. Fellowes the chance to romp through bedroom and ballroom, not to mention down memory lane. A disastrous dinner party referred to throughout the novel—think shattered crockery and illusions—is not described in full until near the end. Even after all that build-up, it proves worth the wait.
Mr. Rubin is a writer in Pasadena, Calif.
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