Past Imperfect

Highly Recommend This Novel by Dowton Abbey Creator

This is a wonderful romp from 1968 to 2008 and back again with Jullian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey. I enjoyed this novel even more than I enjoy Downton. His characters and story are so well-crafted. He has many of the same wit that we see in Downton, with an updated story line on the last of the debutantes and the men they danced with.

Highly Recommended

A brilliant achievement in which the author blends a masterful non-violent mystery with a deep understanding of the social changes which swept the last half of the Twentieth Century. Because the author is positioned by birth to know his subject from the inside, the insights he presents about the relations between the British upper classes offer wholly new insights, and with regard to both irony and humor, the work is masterful.

Julian Fellows: Past Imperfect

Excellent love story but tragic, the way life can be somtimes.

Enjoyable

This book is fun to read. The characters and scenes and locales are what most of us will never know personally, so it's a fun and informative trip through the English upper class of the late 1960s. I will be sad to finish the last book by Julian Fellowes and wait for him to write more.

Great Romp!

What a delightful "twisty-turny" romp from high society characters from 40 years ago, to a clever turn of events to the present. There is such empathy for the characters, even the villain. What a great story; I hated for it to end! Well done!

If I were wealthy and famous...

Fellowes is amusing because he is keenly observant, advantageously placed, and both literate and loquacious. He writes of a class of society most of us will never know personally: the rich, the famous, the titled. While we may not aspire to the life these people endure, there is something intrinsically interesting about a life without the more usual set of boring constraints.

The narrator, very like our author as described above, says plainly at the beginning of Chapter Two; "I've never been a good judge of character. My impressions at first meeting are almost invariably wrong." Why we then place ourselves in this unreliable narrator's hands has everything to do with the ultimate success of the book. We are always a little off-balance and unsure whether we should trust the narrator's observations. We must put our own considerable experience to work deciding the ultimate value of a piece of information. We discover the rich, the famous, and the titled have similar motivations to our own, and constraints almost entirely of their own construction.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.