Book Review - Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

Synopsis:  Damian Baxter is very, very rich - and he's dying. He lives alone in a big house in Surrey, looked after by a chauffeur, butler, cook and housemaid. He has but one concern: who should inherit his fortune...Past Imperfect is the story of a quest. Damian Barker wishes to know if he has a living heir. By the time he married in his late thirties he was sterile (the result of adult mumps), but what about before that unfortunate illness? He was not a virgin. Had he sired a child? A letter from a girlfriend from these times suggests he did. But the letter is anonymous. Damian contacts someone he knew from their days at university. He gives him a list of girls he slept with and sets him a task: find his heir.

First Line:  "London is a haunted city for me now and I am the ghost that haunts it."

Random Quote:  "Her forehead was so smooth she might have been dead, since no expression or mannerism seemed to make it move above the eyebrows, and the eyes themselves had become very fixed in their orbit.  Of course, more or less all this stuff, carrying with it, as it must, horrible images of the pinning and stretching and sawing and sewing of bloody skin and bruised bone, has come about in my lifetime, and I can't be alone in finding it an odd fashion to have developed alongside the supposed liberation of women.  Cutting their faces about, presumably to please men, does not strike one as a convincing mark of equality.  In fact, it feels uncomfortably insecure, a Western manifestation of female circumcision or facial disfigurement or some other dark and ancient method of asserting male ownership."

Review:  I expected this book to be a fun, insubstantial bit of fluff.  Boy, was I surprised.

Leith Hill Tower, Surrey - Image via Wikipedia

Mr. Fellowes wrote the screenplay for Gosford Park and is the author of another novel that I haven't read, but now will.  He's working in P.G. Wodehouse/Evelyn Waugh territory - an English novel of manners - a mix of novel and ethnography of the upper crust with plenty of humor thrown in.

The premise is a lovely one.  The narrator's decidedly former friend, Damien, is dying.  The quest:  to find Damien's hitherto unknown and unidentified illegitimate child.  The prize:  a life-changing inheritance for the to be designated heir.

It would have been easy to write something bitchy and erudite about this journey into the end of the sixties - the Season of 1968 - and the various where are they now stories this journey naturally elicits and that would have been a fine book.  Instead, Fellowes has painstakingly and rather beautifully described a world in transition and captured the tension and ambiguity of the time.  These are not rebellious flower children heading for Carnaby Street to smoke dope with the Beatles.  These are debutantes and their escorts, still in thrall to their parents, and with relatively few options.  The novel is rich in period detail and observation, sumptuous in language, and strangely kind in its judgments of its characters.

I liked almost everyone in this novel and even the characters that I didn't like were worth reading.  I appreciate that Fellowes manages to avoid most stereotypes and to make even the worst sort of gorgon a human being.  This was a lovely read and a nice way to end the year.