Even as a first-time novelist, Julian Fellowes is running the risk of typecasting himself. He's made a career of playing British lords, princes, MPs, and other rarified social types on television and in film, and his screenwriting debut (Gosford Park), its follow-up (the 2004 adaptation of Vanity Fair), and his directorial debut (2004's Separate Lives) are all intimately concerned with the British upper crust, particularly in their relationship to and transgressions against the class system. His debut novel, Snobs, takes up the theme yet again, but it serves as something like a keystone to his previous work: It's not just an observation of modern-day British class mores, it's a pithy, detailed guidebook, built around a central example.
Snobs is mostly written from the first-person point of view of a nameless narrator, a highborn actor with a detached, critical perspective on the social conventions of his separate worlds. Having one foot in high society and the other in film and television gives him a uniquely close perspective on Edith Lavery, the charismatic, ambitious daughter of a successful-but-average accountant. She initially enters his circle though a pair of desperate social climbers, but she surpasses them when she happens to meet, charm, and marry a local aristocrat. Suddenly, she shoots into a rarified world of wealthy, titled people who've known each other from birth, and who regard her as something between an amusing diversion and a mercenary interloper. Nonetheless, Edith considers herself well deserving of power and glory, and she adapts skillfully to her new setting, until it begins to bore her and she leaves her husband for a handsome TV star.
Her subsequent struggle to choose between immense privilege and terrific sex is unlikely to inspire a lot of sympathy, but Snobs isn't a morality tale or a story of heroes. It's a dry, trenchant primer on English classism, with Edith presented more as an illustration than a protagonist. Fellowes frequently pauses the action for wry explanations of his characters and country: "The English have a deep, subconscious need to read their difference in the artefacts around them. Nothing is more depressing (or less convincing) to them than the attempt to claim some rank or position, some family background, some genealogical distinction, without the requisite acquaintance and props." Or, "In England one of the saddest mistakes a social climber can make is excessive generosity… these courteous acts are as clear a signal to the Insiders that the would-be benefactor is a newcomer to their world as if they had worn a sign on their hat." His observations are general, cutting, and possibly not entirely fair. But they're intriguing and incisive nonetheless. So is Snobs, a dense but absorbingly quick read that falls somewhere between a novel and a snide, skillful taxonomy of snobbery in one of its most elaborate and traditional forms.