January 28

Past Imperfect (2009)
By Julian Fellowes

Novelist (Belgravia) and screenplay writer ("Downton Abbey") Fellowes has moved to the present day in Past Imperfect.  The unnamed narrator is contacted by a dying friend, a man he hung out with in the late 1960s/early 70s.  Damian Baxter and he had done the season together, after the days when the queen hosted debutantes (>1958), so parents of young ladies, unwilling to leave the past behind, hosted their own parties in hopes of finding wealthy husbands for their daughters.  At Damian's request, the narrator had introduced his college buddy to his wealthy friends, and all the ladies were smitten with the handsome, ambitious Damian.  The older generation were not so willing to embrace this "nobody", however,  and the parents of one especially lovelorn woman went to great efforts to assure the middle-class Damian that he was unworthy of their titled daughters  As the reader might suspect, these has-been aristocrats were, for the most part, fading into obscurity while the ambitious Damian became wildly successful, amassing a fortune way beyond anything the others had inherited.

But now it is the early 21st century, and everyone is in their 50s.  Damian is dying and calls on the narrator to help with one last dying wish.  The two have not seen one another (nor most of the others from the "season" circle) in decades and Damian, who is single and childless, suspects he had fathered a child with one of the women who loved him when they were young adults.  He gives his old friend a list and asks him to discover the child, who will then stand to inherit Damian's fortune.  While the premise seems a bit sleazy the narrator spends a lot of text pondering on how the world was changing back then; "free love" was the new norm and the old rules and old order were changing.

While Fellowes' novel highlights one particular area of change (the fading British aristocracy), his novel is at its best when he ponders these changes, which mirror the aging process, resistance to - or embracing of - social change, and coping.  Just as "Downton Abbey" is all about the changes of the early 20th century - when the gilded age was dying - Past Imperfect is a good measuring stick with which to compare our own changing society, in which, according to a recent article, 26 billionaires control the same wealth as the 3.8 billion poorest people in the world.  While acknowledging that some billionaires (most notably Bill Gates) give away most of their fortunes to make the world more equitable, one still wonders how long the world can sustain this gross imbalance.