Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Read a Little "Snobs" to Get Ready for the Royal Wedding

If you were a fan of "Monarch of the Glen," you may remember Julian Fellowes as the actor who played aristocratic troublemaker Kilwillie. If you were a fan of the movie "Gosford Park," you may recall Fellowes taking home an Oscar for his screenplay.

And if you fell in love with "Downton Abbey," the smash TV series that ended its first season on PBS a few months ago, then you should certainly recognize Baron Fellowes of West Stafford as the man behind all that delicious drama.

Luckily for those suffering "Downton Abbey" withdrawal, Julian Fellowes is also a novelist. The wit, the sly humor, the intimate knowledge of class and money and position and the never-ending drama inherent in haves and have-nots having a go at each other... It's all there in "Gosford Park," in "Downton Abbey," and also in "Snobs," his 2004 novel.

"Snobs" is a look at contemporary British society, as Fellowes' narrator stand-in, an actor who happens to have gone to the right sort of schools and grown up with the right sort of people, befriends a beautiful young woman who aspires to escape the middle class. Our narrator introduces lovely Edith Lavery to an earl, Charles Broughton, who happens to be an unexciting but ever-so-eligible bachelor, and then watches as Edith snares the Earl, his family doesn't react well to the interloper, she meets a much more dashing man, she strays, society treats her like dirt, and then our social-climber Edith has to decide whether it's better to get good sex on the wrong side of town or to be rich, pampered and terribly bored with the Lord of the Manor.

It's not the specific plot points that make "Snobs" so entertaining, but the inside look at the British class system. We may think, because we know a bit about the Donald Trumps and Paris Hiltons on our side of the pond, or because we've seen "The Philadelphia Story" a million times, that we understand the the spectacle of the "privileged class enjoying its privileges." Au contraire!

For one thing, England's privileged class is very different from ours. Landed gentry, titles, hounds, horses, clubs, generations of learning how to make others feel small... Donald Trump has a lot to learn. Fellowes knows this milieu and portrays it with affection as well as some measure of cynicism, and it's hard not to try to figure out if he's really talking about somebody specific in his tale of an unsophisticated girl marrying a man who is so far above her station.

Whoever he's dishing on, whatever point he was trying to make, Fellowes is definitely funny in "Snobs," and the book can fill a few hours while you wait for more "Downton Abbey." Or wait for the newest Royal Wedding, wherein Kate the Commoner will exchange vows with Prince William the Charming. Kate seems a lot smarter and less self-destructive than fictional Edith, and I hope Prince William has more on the ball than deadly dull Charles Broughton in the book. Let's hope so!


  1. So glad you decided to write about this book, Julie! I bought it year ago in a UK airport bookshop for in-flight reading as I returned home, and it's just the thing for an ambivalent anglophile like me.

    All the little minutiae like how That Sort of People issue and receive invitations (they'll go to restaurants if they're in London, but oh never in the country), and how you can be welcome among them until you commit a faux pas after which it's forget it... I love that stuff. And indeed, nobody knows that milieu better than Fellowes, he being sort of half born into it and half an onlooker (being also an actor/writer).

    I love his parents' names: his mother was Olwen Stuart-Jones and his father was Peregrine Edward Launcelot Fellowes. His stepmother was an earl's daughter and a baron's widow.

  2. That explains why he has a child named Peregrine!

    It was very interesting to me how inconsistent some of the rules seemed to be. So Charles' sister is married to a money-grubbing nobody who is absolutely vile, and he seems to be accepted for the most part. (Because he's vile?) But then Edith simply cannot be allowed into the club, and the vile brother-in-law is the one at the front of the Anti-Edith Brigade.

    I imagine everyone's favorite character is Charles's mother, "Googie." (Also known as Lady Uckfield, which is a hilarious name all by itself.) You get the idea that Our Narrator likes her best, too, even though she really is awful so much of the time. And her life is no bargain, being married to a moron! Such is life in the Hoity Toity Club. Interestingly enough, this dilemma (A woman may hook up with a moron for the position that comes with it, but what about what she has to give up?) was also at the center of "Elemeno Pea," one of the Humana Festival plays I reviewed. We're talking East Coast, American-style aristocrats, but the putative love interest is just as idiotic, even if the in-and-out privileges are a bit more fluid.

  3. I don't remember the book in much detail, I fear. Maybe the vile brother-in-law doesn't matter because daughters don't matter as much as sons when it comes to misalliances? (Like, Lady Mary Wimsey marrying a policeman was joked about but eventually grudgingly accepted, while Lord Peter marrying a novelist with a bohemian past is a scandal?) I don't know....

  4. I'm sure you're right. Plus I think the s-i-l had money, so selling off the daughter to a classless twit was no biggie. It's the son who needs to be properly settled, since he will be siring future heirs and all. Well, maybe. (Don't want to give away too many plot details.)