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.
The heroine, Edith Lavery, is not an aristocrat but by this stage of the story has been married to and parted from the heir to the great house and has acquired ‘the patina of privilege’. She is spoilt, bored and beautiful — observers of the marriage break-up see her as ‘a little nobody who couldn’t handle it’ — but she still commands the reader’s sympathy. As does her nice, bluff, dull, lumpish and ultimately honourable husband.
The three sections of this book are fancifully headed ‘Impetuoso-Fiero’, ‘Forte-Piano’ and ‘Dolente-Ernegico’, but the story is an extremely unponderous one, mainly concerned with Edith’s extra-marital affair with ‘one of those actors who play aristocrats so often on television that they end up by believing in themselves as one’.
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