Why did I find this 2008 book about young upper-class London men and women in the 1960s fascinating? All through it, I kept asking myself that question.
Being someone with a working class background, and a lifelong loner who self-diagnosed himself as autistic, I was hardly a candidate to like this book. The ways of the rich have always made me a bit nauseous, and the big social events described with such care in Past Imperfect, did that again in spades.
What drew me in was partly the remarkable writing talent of Julian Fellowes, who I was meeting in print for the first time.
Another part is the plot. Two men who knew each other when they were young, who began with a tentative friendship, then came to despise each other, finally meet again towards the end of their lives. One is the narrator of the story (who as far as I could tell is never named), and the other is Damian, the only son of the manager of a shoe factory, someone who could never expect to be accepted in high upper class British society, but got inside by manipulating its young women.
Now Damian is super rich, but he’s dying with no heirs and wants to find out whether one of 5 women (I’m not sure of this number – almost every woman in the book has tried to get in bed with him) might have had a child by him. Bed-ridden, he persuades the narrator to look them up and investigate this question – gives him a credit card to fund all expenses.
The problem is – each of those women had been a potential lover for the narrator too, except that each time Damian got them instead, especially one who the narrator was deeply in love with. Why does he accept the task? All I can say is Fellowes makes this work. He is a fictional magician.
Part of what kept me going too is the polished prose. Some reviewers have complained that the novel is too wordy, but Fellowes’ words are smooth and they flow like quicksilver. They never get in the way.
His remarkable skill in all aspects of writing had me wondering where this comes from, but when I looked him up (believe it or not I had no idea who he was) I learned that he began as a playwright, and was the creator of the successful TV drama Downtown Abbey (which I’ve never seen).
If you want to write novels and you don’t know where to start, I’ve said somewhere that you should get a book on script writing. Syd Field’s two books Screenplay and The Screenwriter’s Workbook taught me more about writing a novel than anything else I’ve read. Not only do you learn dialogue, but you learn pacing, which is essential in the commercial film world which most novelists hope to reach. Yet most modern authors, at least of ‘literary’ fiction, seem to have never heard of pacing. Meanwhile, Fellowes is a master of it. After all, he’s a retired screenwriter.
The key to writing a successful novel is getting the reader to keep turning the page. If I was going to tell an aspiring novelist one thing that would help them do that, I would tell them about foreshadowing. And I’d suggest they read Past Imperfect to see a masterful use of it.
A single disastrous night at a dinner party one summer in 1968 Portugal is mysteriously alluded to again and again by the narrator, demonstrating that that event has overwhelming importance to him. It’s the key to everything, especially to the hostility he still feels towards Damian. But you wait a long time to find out what happened that night.
Yes, this is a social horror story, which is probably why many reviewers hated the book.
Fellowes, knowing I think what a dark story it is, tries suddenly at the end to rescue the traumatized narrator, to turn this into a version of the fairy story where the frog finally gets kissed by the princess. That, I’m afraid, doesn’t work very well. But even Dickens and Balzac had weak endings.
I think Fellowes would have been better to leave the story as dark as it is, with little bits of real love and sincerity to be found along the way if you look hard for them.
The problem for those of us who love sincerely, is that we so often fail, while those more callous and calculating so often succeed. This book sets out to prove that for you – if you want a subtitle for it, I’d suggest, Triumph of a Sociopath.
For a long time I’ve looked for a way to demonstrate that the social world can be profoundly unrewarding for someone who is autistic, shy, or introverted. It can be rewarding too, but you need to keep your guard up. Read Past Perfect and you’ll see what I mean.
For me, the big question remains why I had to read this book all the way to the end. The answer, I’m beginning to think, is that Julian Fellowes might be the finest novelist this new century has yet produced.
Alan Conrad 