Past Imperfect: From the creator of DOWNTON ABBEY and THE GILDED AGE by Julian Fellowes

Past Imperfect: From the creator of DOWNTON ABBEY and THE GILDED AGE Reviews

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  innovauser

  Like so many reviewers who gave this one star, I also found this book tremedously dull, and far too wordy when I really had high hopes of the screenwriter of Downton Abbey. What plot there was in this novel was burried in Fellows descriptions of upper class life, and was a very simple plot at that, a search for a lost love child. Flitting back and forth from past to present the search bumbled on, and at every turn the promise to reveal the dramatic reason for the fallout between the protagonists. When it arrived it was the biggest damp squib I have ever read. I persevered with this book, but wish I hadn't bothered. I shall not bother with his other novels, and consign this one to the nearest charity shop
• 
  Suzie

  I put off reading this as the central theme a dying man engages a friend from university days, who now hates him, to track down a possible heir to his vast fortune didn't particularly appeal. It was a feeling that persisted during the first part of the search, but by then I was intrigued, not least by the notion of something so awful happening one evening in Portugal many years ago that it engendered the intense hatred still felt by the narrator decades later. You have to wait until the end to learn the details of that fateful evening.It's extremely well written in a style that's elegant and may seem, sadly, old fashioned to some younger readers, but I loved it as it describes an age with which I was so familiar. Written from today's perspective, the book portrays a very different stratum of social hierarchy than the grittier novels written at the time and for the moment the likes of A Kind of Loving, The L Shaped Room, and Room at the Top. The sixties were a period when society was in the throes of change. It was an era of so called liberation from the s and attitudes of the past, although I have to say that not everyone was as sexually liberated as the characters in this book and there was still much stigma attached to divorce or getting pregnant outside marriage.Moving in humbler social spheres than those portrayed by Julian Fellowes, I was nevertheless aware of debutantes, the London season, and the white dresses at the `coming out' parties. In Past Imperfect the dying man, Damian Baxter, also hails from a humble background, but gatecrashes the season on an initial introduction by the narrator, who was then a friend. He soon ingratiates himself with his charm and good looks, and worms his way into the affections and, it seems, the beds, of the young women. What happened during the rest of that long summer is interspersed with the narrator's present task of tracking down Damian Baxter's heir.Although I loved this book, I felt it wasn't quite perfect as a novel. The frequent lengthy expositions on how things were in the '60s interrupted the flow, at times making the book feel less of a novel, a commentary on the social s of the time. For me this was fascinating because the narrator's reminiscences took me back to `my era', a time when you could drive into London without being held up in traffic, and a time before mobile phones were dreamed of. He even mentions Angélique, an establishment where you kept your table for the whole evening and could dance after dinner I imagine he is referring to Angélique in the King's Road, somewhere I used to love being taken to in those long forgotten days when I was young and single. If you're interested in social history or lived through that era that's fine, but if you prefer a faster moving story, you might find these regular digressions intrusive and slow.
• 
  goodreads Addict

  I think I was expecting another Downton considering the author. It was an interesting story of a dying man wanting his former friend to locate the woman who may have had his child. So the protagonist goes around all their former friends from way back in the 60s to quietly try and discover who it was. My problem was that it seemed to be set around a group that moved in higher class circles and it all became a little bit tedious. I hate to say this as I think Julian Fellowes is brilliant and seems a lovely man.I knew by the end that I wouldn't want to listen to it all again.
• 
  Adrea Hennessy

  Best Julian Fellowes novel! Good plot, excellently drawn characters, sharp observations of the then (Sixties) and now, great sense of humour and living proof that the English language is not dead yet! Anyone whose vocabulary extends beyond grunting in 600 words maximum, should be honoured and feted!
• 
  Russian Jewess

  Yet again another First Edition Collectable Book purchased from U. K. that arrived totally worthless, as it has a sticker on the back. This book will join the Siegfried Funeral Pyre with the other book I just got that I paid £70. What a waste of almost £100 and you think Yanks are naïf. Some of you need to leave the Booksellers Trade, please.