Past Imperfect

Superb writing

What an under-appreciated writer (even given the multiple Emmys and Academy award); he is extraordinarily gifted. This book was a pleasure to read.

Superb! Even though the bloom has fallen off the rose as far as my love of Downton Abbey is concerned, I still feel Fellowes is by far the best at setting the scene and fleshing out the characters that inhabit the posh world of which he is a part.

This book is fantastic and I'm surprised I had never picked it up previously. I'm glad I saw it peeking out at me from my library's shelves!

The narrator of Past Imperfect accepts an unexpected invitation from Damian Baxter, a one-time friend and Cambridge classmate that he now considers an enemy. Back in the 1960s, the narrator, who had lived on the fringe of posh society, opened the door for Damian, who was of an even lower social status, but something pushed them apart. Damian is now filthy rich, alone, and dying. He had received an unsigned note telling him that he had fathered a child back in the day but never bothered to pursue the claim. Now, he asks the narrator to find out which of the seven women he had bedded back in the debutante season of 1968 had borne his child. The chance to see how his old companions had turned out is too much to resist.

Fellowes moves us back and forth from the swinging 60s to the present day, exploring the complexities of class, friendship, and love along the way. Two events are pivotal: a debutante ball where someone serves hashish brownies, and the picnic that blew apart the narrator’s friendship with Damian and left them both expelled from their social circle. The narrator’s quest is sometimes amusing, often bittersweet.

In PAST IMPERFECT by Julian Fellowes, we have an unnamed narrator who is contacted by a former friend, Damian Baxter, to locate a woman who he believed gave birth to his child in 1968.
Our narrator reluctantly agrees to this request and begins his quest in a very reflective state of mind and discovers as much about himself (past and present) as he does about the members of a debutante group he was a part of in the late 60s.
The story is a bit long, but interesting, detailed, witty and a bit sad.
As with Julian Fellowes’ book, SNOBS, the story is told against the backdrop of English class and society. I liked the details of London in the 1960s. I liked the book’s cover art. I became a bit reflective, myself, about past friends and experiences. A great read.

Jullian Fellowes offers a more modern insight into the British class snobbery. His works are fun if you're into that sort of thing. This one was sort of a fun mystery, to boot.

Julian Fellowes, Oscar winning screenwriter of "Gosford Park" and the creator of the hit TV show "Downton Abbey" turns his gimlet eye on modern British society in this novel. The story isn't much: a man is contacted by his old nemesis who is now dying and asked to track down his long-lost illegitimate child so he can leave his fortune to him or her. This sets the narrator on a quest and also back into reminiscing about his days of hobnobbing in high society during the London season of 1968.

However, apart from a somewhat lame plot, there are Fellowes' thoughts and criticisms of the old class-bound British society and what it has devolved into today. And his observations are both fascinating and pretty much spot-on. For readers who like novels of manners as well as students of social history, this book is a treat.

Brilliantly observant and understanding of relationships. And very funny. Love the narrator's descriptions - a minor member of royalty he finds looks more like a boy scout during bob-a-job week than a princess. The structure is interesting, going back to the debutantes coming out in the 60's, to how they have survived in this changed world of the present. A social satire, focusing on the upper-middles and aristocracy.

Very enjoyable, though I sometimes found it hard to remember that it was depicting a world of only forty years ago. At times it seemed like something more suited to the height of the Victorian age.
This was, in a way, reminiscent of Anthony Powell's "Dance to the Music of Time" - it had the same sense of life focused on a very small group of people, all of whom knew, or at least knew of, each other - though I was not always convinced that Fellowes was all together approving of that world. Is he sounding a dolorous death-knell at its passing, or breathing a sigh of relief?
The author does occasionally have a tendency to preach about his particular bugbears, too, but on the whole I found this very compelling.

Caustic depiction of the class divide at the end of the debutante era in London.

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

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.

This is a beautifully written and thoughtful book. It was a pleasure to read not only for its prose and its careful observation and humor, but for its humanity. Perhaps I am reaching a similar stage in my life as the narrator (who bears remarkable similarities to the author) who leads us through the book. A comparison between those heady times when ones life is before you and the possibilities are seemingly endless and the days when the vast majority of ones life is receding into the distance and the possibilities more proscribed by choice and circumstance.

The narrator reluctantly takes on Damian Baxter's dying request to determine whether he had fathered a child by one of his many past girlfriends so he may leave his legacy to an heir. The narrator and Damian had a notorious falling out 40 years previously.

The book is a record of that journey, and an interesting comment on the interpretation and perception of ones self and of others. It is also a meditation on the overarching effect of the choices made or avoided and where those decisions have taken us and the consequences thereof (a consistent theme for Fellowes, as this was the profound message of his excellent first novel, "Snobs").

The books also speaks to the great dilemma of the young in balancing whether to commit to personal visions, possibilities, and desires despite youthful inexperience, or to be overrun by the expectations and projections of parents and others who allegedly have experience and wisdom, yet are bound by the myopia of their time and their own regrets.

There are many interesting and often poignant juxtapositions of well drawn characters, such as between the two "self made" outsiders, Damian Baxter and Kieran de Yong, and again, most touchingly, between the widow and widower in the story.

While "Past Imperfect" is neither an elegiac lament for departed youth or bygone era, it nonetheless has a subdued and elegiac tone, with the conclusion calling to mind the penultimate lines of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard": "He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear, / He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend."

I sort-of enjoyed this book, which I know is a bit lukewarm. Although our unnamed narrator seems obsessively preoccupied with the way things were back then as opposed to how they are now. I found the narrator intriguing: he has a singular lack of confidence, but at the same time he’s extremely witty and sarcastic.

His other characters don’t come off so well, though; I never really understood what made Damian so appealing to the other characters, especially the women. The narrator’s dislike for Damian was a bit odd, too; for most of the book, he keeps saying over and over that he doesn’t like him, but the narrator’s attitude to Damian in the ‘60s is quite lukewarm. I think we’re supposed to believe that the narrator’s dislike occurred during that fateful evening in Portugal, but I couldn’t really see it; what happened is something you’d be a bit embarrassed by, not hate someone over.

Neither do you really get a sense of Damian’s hate towards the elite upper crust; although I can understand that his upbringing has something to do with it, his hate isn’t palpable until the very end of the book. It just didn’t seem believable to me. The women involved in the story are somewhat interesting; but why did they all have to end up with depressing lives, married to bores? Couldn’t at least one, besides Terry the American heiress, have a happy ending?

But I did think this book was extremely funny—there are some lines in there that I was howling over, and I defy you not to laugh at Terry’s disastrous party at Madame Tussaud’s. I definitely enjoyed Snobs much more than this book, though.

Interesting how certain books come into your life at certain times. Past Imperfect is the story of Damien, an enormously wealthy man who is dying, quite alone. He summons our unknown narrator to help him find if he has a child and gives the narrator a list of women who had babies in the possible time frame, back 40 years. Our narrator meets with these women to determine if Damien could be the father of their child.

Having just lost my only brother, I am perhaps more introspective than some; but this book and my recent loss set me to thinking about lost chances, mistakes made in my youth and the paths chosen and not chosen. This book is an excellent portrait of what life was like in the titled and upper classes in the late 1960s in Great Britain. After the 1968 debutante season, coming out balls were never quite the same. The young women of Damien’s and the narrator’s acquaintance were raised only to become wives and mothers. Careers were seldom mentioned for these women. Having lived through the 1960s, albeit in the United States, I found the description of the times fascinating.

My only negative finding is that the book is perhaps too long. The author tends to take five pages to describe a scene when it could have been done in one or two. The story is otherwise flawless with sharp character development, some fine humor and a marvelous feeling for the time described. Past Imperfect is thought provoking and left me emphasizing with Damien and his quest.

Starts well, with sharp observations and dry wit, but finishes poorly. Julian Fellowes examines the forced modernisation of the upper crust - the 'toffs' - either subjectively as an insider, or critically removed from the periphery of their world (I was never totally sure). The device he employs to contrast the classes - the dying request of a self-made man who insinuated himself into the exclusive clique of a group of debutantes in the 1960s - is cleverly played throughout most of the book, but the tension is not maintained into a suitably climactic revelation. The infamous 'Portugal Incident' which parts the group of friends for forty years is actually rather pathetic when finally disclosed - the 'greasy oik' who charmed his way into the hearts and lives of the privileged few is publically rebuffed, and turns on the others in a fit of wounded pride - and the search for his heir is similarly unassuming.

Fellowes' tangents on the loss of certain traditions and modes of etiquette throughout the book are informative if nostalgic, but his constant harping on the evolution of the toffs as almost a separate species grows old quickly. Damian Baxter, as the interloper drawn to and then repulsed by the old ways, is praised for succeeding on his own merits, and eclipsing the passive achievments of the titled set who spurned him. Those born to wealth and advantage are doomed to unhappy, unproductive and unfulfilled lives - until Baxter's millions empowers them to take charge of their lives. The message is rather heavy-handed, and Damian does not convince as a hero or a catalyst - we are told, repeatedly, of his great charisma, but only in contrast to the negative portrayal of old money does he stand out as anything special.

Part social commentary from a Grumpy Old Man, part metaphor, this is standard fare from Fellowes, but still amusing and well written (apart from the excessive comma use between adjectives!)