Toffy delight

Julian Fellowes has delivered again. No, I'm not referring to the third series of Downton Abbey - it doesn't start in Sweden until November - but to his novel Past Imperfect, which I finished a week ago and enjoyed hugely. It dates from the era pre-Downton, like the other Fellowes novel Snobs. I had considered buying one of them for some time, but was held back by bourgeois misgivings. It is no secret that Fellowes is a champion of the English upper class, and he has gone on record saying  (with some justice) that toff-bashing is the only prejudice which is not chastised by society in general. Good for him, but what does a man like that make of the kind of people I admire - the energetic doers of the middle class? Isn't  there a risk that he would - well, sneer?

I don't know if I'm typical of other members of the middle class, but deep down I have a lingering fear that those above me on the social ladder sneer at me, and those below me want to kill me, or at the very least rob me. Above, there's Sir Percy Blakeney, baronet; below, there's the wheezing, bourgeois-girl-throttling miner grandpa from the film Germinal (no, I haven't read the book, nor will I). And while I have to confess that wheezing miner grandpas are probably thin on the ground, my mistrust of aristocrats - and gentry - is harder to shift. I have wondered from time to time if I do toffs an injustice, the English ones at least. There's Josephine Tey's Inspector Grant claiming that the English nobility never looked down their noses at anyone. There's Bertie Wooster and his pals in P.G. Wodehouse's novels, who are delighted with American millionaires and their daughters and never seem to spare a thought for the way they eat their peas. Maybe the picture of the English aristocracy as disdainful dandies conjured up by characters such as Sir Percy, various Regency Romance bucks, even sometimes Lord Peter Wimsey - all, let's not forget, meant to be heroic - is quite simply wrong? Maybe they're all an unaffected and jolly lot who like a hunt now and then but who couldn't care less about what you call the smallest room in the house?

Then on the other hand, no, I don't think it's quite that simple. The upper-crust world described by Fellowes in Past Imperfect does little to dispel my wariness. It's not that Fellowes is in any way mean to his own kind. He is loyal to his caste and fights their corner. His upper-class characters are for the most part well-rounded, often likeable, and a welcome change from Midsomer Murder-like grotesques. You want them to do well. At the same time, not even Fellowes can absolve them from the sin of snobbery (in the modern sense). It is snobbery of the worst kind directed at the middle-class interloper of the '68 Season, Damian Baxter, that embitters him and causes him to lash out against amongst others the novel's hero. It is snobbery that makes his lashing-out as harmful as it is, with the hero feeling resentful over the repercussions forty years down the line. Snobbery (and, it must be said, chippiness) needlessly poison the atmosphere between the book's protagonists, and Fellowes, far from gushing over snobbish behaviour like the baroness Orczy and her ilk, is severely against it. The unnamed hero does his best to fight tendencies of haughtiness in himself, not always with success. You marvel at his attempt to understand why we ordinary non-high-born mortals want to dine "early", that is, sometime before eight or half past eight in the evening. Er, because we're hungry.

All the same, Past Imperfect leaves one feeling quite toff-friendly at the end and willing to extend a conciliating hand. Heck, these are people, not monocled ogres. Even the poised aristo babe mellows on closer acquaintance, much like Lady Mary in Downton. My fear of sneering is still present and correct, though. There are, after all, exchanges such as this:

"Did Damian really say 'pleased to meet you'?"
"Apparently. It just shows how nervous he must have been."

What's wrong with "pleased to meet you"? What? So wrong even a social climber would only say it if he was "nervous"? It's this mindless tabooing of certain phrases, words and gestures just to trip up us who are not in the know and brand us "vulgar" that makes me see red. Maybe I've got more in common with grandpa miner after all?          

To care and not to care

When reading The Secret History some time ago, I was as I've mentioned earlier afraid that I'd caught revieweritis and that this was the reason why I didn't lose myself in the book at first. Lately, I've had the opposite problem: I'm reading like a teenager, caring overmuch and engaging myself in the fates of minor characters. It happened with Bring Up the Bodies, and then again when I read Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. This seemed the perfect antidote to Bring Up the Bodies to start with. The atmosphere of the said circus (which is more like a mysterious fun fair really, which is fine by me: no clowns and no treacherous dancing horses!) was the main thing, rather than the characters or the fairy-tale-like plot. I initially thought about blogging about the book under the heading "Not quite in love with a fairy-tale".

But then the emotional charge of the novel was ratcheted up. At the end, I really wanted everything to turn out well. Not for the sake of the circus: it sounds like a truly great night out, but everything has its day, and there's little use getting obsessed by even the most magical public entertainment. Nor for the sake of the two protagonists, Celia and Marco, fighting a magic duel on behalf of two scary magicians. Celia is all right, but Marco is a pretty callous piece of work, and they both appear too wrapped up in each other - yes, of course they fall in love eventually - to fully register the unhappiness their manipulations may cause other people. Also, their naïve notion that once their competition is over, all will be well for the loser as well as for the winner and everyone will go out and have cake is irritating (like the scary magicians would let that happen). The reason I wanted things to work out was for the sake of the characters on the sideline whose lives are turned upside down by all the magicking: Marco's hapless ex-but-doesn't-realise-it girlfriend; the farm boy with a crush on a circus girl who gets saddled with a lot of responsibility very fast; and, lastly, the flamboyant circus director Chandresh Christophe Lefèvre who get suckered into hiring Marco as his assistant by magic seduction. I never thought I'd warm to Chandresh as he comes across as rather a pretentious show-off at the beginning, but when a poor chap not only has his creativity halted and his memory shot to pieces at regular intervals but also has to nurse an unrequited passion for years on end, one can't help pitying him. Marco, needless to say, cares even less for his employer's feelings than for his dumped girlfriend's.

Authors have good reason to be miffed at readers who react like this. Minor characters are, as often as not, there to keep the plot moving, and they shouldn't be the reason why one gets disenchanted with the main protagonists. After all, what are Chandresh and Mark Smeaton to me, or I to them, that I should weep for them? One can imagine authors feeling like John Gielgud reportedly did at one time (if I remember the anecdote correctly) when an actor asked him about the "motivation" for his minor role, and he was tempted to answer: "to be a feed for Hamlet". On the other hand, you could see it as a compliment to an author when a minor character of his/hers manages to engage a reader: it should certainly beat the reader not caring at all.

Anyway, it is quite a relief to be reading Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes (of Downton fame) at the moment, a gentle and amusing read which I don't think is in danger of making me care too much for its characters. Then again, I could be wrong: the plot's driving force (estranged friend of the mildly toffy hero) is after all an embittered social climber, and I do tend to have a weakness for those.