“The Party” by Elizabeth Day

Elizabeth Day is a frequent presence on the relatively few television programmes we now have that are devoted to books. She is therefore a familiar face to me, but until I picked this book up, I had not read any of her work before.

This is a very accomplished and not so dissimilar in terms of its structure from other recent novels I have read. It moves about in time, has two narrators and cleverly draws you in as characters are filled out and their secrets revealed. There are wonderful observations and turns of phrase. It is impossible once into this book not to want to push on and find out what went on in these characters’ lives both in the recent and not-so-recent past. It is not a thriller, but uses some of the techniques of thriller writers to impressive effect.

It has a state-of-the-nation whiff about it, being about well-off, privately educated men who operate in the city, journalism and politics. It was written soon after David Cameron ceased to be Prime Minister and before Boris Johnson’s ascent, and there are characters in there that have quite a lot in common with these two. They are, needless to say, portrayed unfavourably as heartless, self-serving, posh sexists. But I guess that is what goes down well with the Guardian-reading classes for whom I presume this book is largely written. It gets tedious after a while to see so many TV and film productions and novels taking simplistic and unfair aim at people whose only real sin was to be highly successful electorally and pursue an agenda lefty-liberals didn’t like very much. At least for a change it is Cambridge’s Pitt Club that gets targeted here rather than Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, although Elizabeth’s PM is called ‘Ed Buller’.

The politics, of course, irritated me. But the real problem for me with this one was its lack of charm. The characters are all pretty unpleasant and self-centred. You kind of sympathise with the one called Martin at the start because he had a very rough childhood and via scholarships got himself to a good school and on to Cambridge. But he is later revealed to be just as much of a cruel bastard as everyone else. It is impossible therefore to empathise with anyone and it is the plot rather than effectively-drawn characters which keeps you reading.

I would like to try another Elizabeth Day novel one day in the hope that her splendid prose style might be put to use in the service of a less cynical set of plot devices. This one kept me turning the pages, but I would so very much love to have done so with more emotional engagement.