This provocative, titillating and seductive novel is about upper-class affectations and ‘the mystery of unearned greatness’. It focuses on a network of rich, blue-blooded and slightly dim grandees which apparently stretches ‘far beyond national boundaries’. Snobs describes in forensic detail a world where duchesses are ‘taken in’ to dinner and desperate, social-climbing women feel deeply ashamed that they never ‘came out’.
Can such people still exist? Can this fascinating story really be set in modern times, or at least in the late 1990s? A few contemporary references to Volvo estates and Partridge’s upmarket food stores are not enough to convince me.
Events unfold in an immensely imposing and well-capitalised stately home in East Sussex — the family still have substantial ‘London holdings’ — and in other smart, secondary locations. Extraordinarily gripping set pieces take place at Annabel’s White’s, the Royal Enclosure at Ascot — those present apparently ‘pretend they are part of some vanished leisure class’ — and finally in a car, terrifyingly driven by the heroine’s aristocratic sister-in-law, a woman who has not yet mastered the art of talking to someone without facing them.
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