Funny, astute observations on class and society in England - mostly in the 60's and 70's. Fellowes is a bit of a snob and some of his ruminations on how we just don't do things right the way we used to are insufferable. But he is a brilliant raconteur and can make me laugh. ( )

Gripping story, funny but characters not v. believable. ( )

This is a beautifully written and thoughtful book. It was a pleasure to read not only for its prose and its careful observation and humor, but for its humanity. Perhaps I am reaching a similar stage in my life as the narrator (who bears remarkable similarities to the author) who leads us through the book. A comparison between those heady times when ones life is before you and the possibilities are seemingly endless and the days when the vast majority of ones life is receding into the distance and the possibilities more proscribed by choice and circumstance.

The narrator reluctantly takes on Damian Baxter's dying request to determine whether he had fathered a child by one of his many past girlfriends so he may leave his legacy to an heir. The narrator and Damian had a notorious falling out 40 years previously.

The book is a record of that journey, and an interesting comment on the interpretation and perception of ones self and of others. It is also a meditation on the overarching effect of the choices made or avoided and where those decisions have taken us and the consequences thereof (a consistent theme for Fellowes, as this was the profound message of his excellent first novel, "Snobs").

The books also speaks to the great dilemma of the young in balancing whether to commit to personal visions, possibilities, and desires despite youthful inexperience, or to be overrun by the expectations and projections of parents and others who allegedly have experience and wisdom, yet are bound by the myopia of their time and their own regrets.

There are many interesting and often poignant juxtapositions of well drawn characters, such as between the two "self made" outsiders, Damian Baxter and Kieran de Yong, and again, most touchingly, between the widow and widower in the story.

While "Past Imperfect" is neither an elegiac lament for departed youth or bygone era, it nonetheless has a subdued and elegiac tone, with the conclusion calling to mind the penultimate lines of Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard": "He gave to Mis'ry all he had, a tear, / He gain'd from Heav'n ('twas all he wish'd) a friend." ( )

Julian Fellows is obsessed with the ways of the snobbish aristocracy and his first book Snobs took a humerous look how hard it is hard for the parvenue to break into the British upper class no matter how much money they have. In this book his obsession continues through the eyes of the narrator who spends a lot of the time bemoaning the fact that the good old days of the true aristocracy are gone and that the real moneyed who tend to ape the ways of the old aristocracy just don't have that inbred sense of class to get them over the line. I plodded my way through to the end hoping that Fellows would inject some of his well known wit into the book but alas he didn't. Awaiting his next book in hope! ( )

I sort-of enjoyed this book, which I know is a bit lukewarm. Although our unnamed narrator seems obsessively preoccupied with the way things were back then as opposed to how they are now. I found the narrator intriguing: he has a singular lack of confidence, but at the same time he’s extremely witty and sarcastic.

His other characters don’t come off so well, though; I never really understood what made Damian so appealing to the other characters, especially the women. The narrator’s dislike for Damian was a bit odd, too; for most of the book, he keeps saying over and over that he doesn’t like him, but the narrator’s attitude to Damian in the ‘60s is quite lukewarm. I think we’re supposed to believe that the narrator’s dislike occurred during that fateful evening in Portugal, but I couldn’t really see it; what happened is something you’d be a bit embarrassed by, not hate someone over.

Neither do you really get a sense of Damian’s hate towards the elite upper crust; although I can understand that his upbringing has something to do with it, his hate isn’t palpable until the very end of the book. It just didn’t seem believable to me. The women involved in the story are somewhat interesting; but why did they all have to end up with depressing lives, married to bores? Couldn’t at least one, besides Terry the American heiress, have a happy ending?

But I did think this book was extremely funny—there are some lines in there that I was howling over, and I defy you not to laugh at Terry’s disastrous party at Madame Tussaud’s. I definitely enjoyed Snobs much more than this book, though. ( )