The Party by Elizabeth Day

This was a well written book from an obviously talented author.
I didn’t love it as there were too many unlikable characters and the plot felt a little too much like books I’ve read before.
But I did enjoy it and would definitely be interested in reading more my this author in future.

Many thanks to the publishers & to NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review this book.

The Party is the first book I have read by Elizabeth Day. It’s extremely well written. I enjoyed the story told from different accounts and over varying time frames.

All of the characters, with the exception of Lucy, were very unlikeable. Which made it a difficult read for me personally but was necessary to the overall storyline. It has elements of suspense and intrigue but it is more a study of relationships. And it does this very well.

I look forward to reading another book by this author.

A highly enjoyable book: the perfect holiday read. It has a lot of features that you recognize – an unreliable narrator (I loved the amazon reviewer who called him ‘a psychopathic Adrian Mole’), an unequal friendship between a golden boy and someone much less attractive, the framing device where we know something terrible happened at the Party of the title, a sour look at the class system and the powerful glitterati in modern Britain. The timeframe jumps about, and you have to check each chapter to see when and where it takes place, and who is the narrator.

All this was very familiar, but for me that meant I just settled in to enjoy it. Of course you don’t warm to the main character, and you know that the aristocratic Ben (how did he get to stand for Parliament with his title?) is shallow and worthless, you can even guess what Martin’s hold is on the family. But it was great fun to watch it all unfold with many a wince-and cringe-making moment. Lucy – really the only major female character – was very intriguing, and I thought deserved more of her own story. The scene where she interrupts a discussion of modern American literature was the most biting bit of social satire in the book.

The two main men meet at school, where effortlessly successful Ben helps out the unpopular scholarship boy Martin. Their friendship continues on through the rest of their lives until, in middle age, the party of the title brings its own showdown. There are homoerotic undertones in their relationship, though it is never clear that Martin has any good points. Initially I thought Ben was just good-natured enough to be kind to another boy, but nothing in the rest of his portrayal makes that seem likely. Was Martin in fact terribly sexy? Perhaps.

The scenario has echoes of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, Charles & Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited, the works of Alan Hollinghurst, even The Great Gatsby, but has its own intricacies and plot turns. And as with Highsmith, how very interesting to get a female take on this storyline.

The picture of the schoolboys is from the New South Wales archives.

The suit poster is from Next, a very fine retailer but probably not where Martin or Ben get their clothes from.

This has been my favourite book of the year so far. Such a well crafter novel, compelling enough to pull you through and very quick read. I enjoyed it so much from the first page till the end. This is a story shaped in the form of 2 diaries: one is Martin's and the other belongs to his wife, Lucy. I love multiple perspectives in a novel. It reminded me of "Brideshed Revisited" and "The Great Gatsby", but it was better than them. The character development was so good, also the writing style. I also loved the way the book sfifts between Martin's police interrogation, his childhood memories, his school years and the time he met Ben. Lucy's diary entries scatteres throughout the book helped me as a reader to see and feel how misplaced they were feeling as part of this so called friendship with Ben and Serena. She was the only one who could see Ben and Serena for what they were : manipulative and selfish. I spent so much time trying to figure out what kind of a character Martin is, was he only a psychopat , why this obession for Ben , trying to relate his behaviour to his unhappy childhood, the negative presence of his mother and this ongoing desire to be liked and accepted by others, especially by Ben. I truly recommend it to you all.

Ben and Martin were born into very different family circumstances - one into a life of privilege and inherited wealth, the other the child of an impoverished, embittered woman widowed before he was born. Martin is clever, though, and wins a scholarship to the public school where he inveigles his way into the fringes of Ben’s entrancing but unassailable world. Despite growing tensions, they are still in contact 25 years later and we join them on the occasion of a lavish party celebrating Ben’s 40th birthday. Everyone is on edge and the atmosphere is ominous. You just know something is going to give.

‘It’s like tripping over a pebble and breaking a leg. Sometimes the entire course of your life can change because of a single second, because that single second doesn’t exist in isolation: it is connected to an infinite chain of minutes, days, weeks, months and years that have gone before. But it’s the misshapen second that unravels it. A dropped stitch that ruins a knitted scarf.’

Not such an unfamiliar story. What sets it apart are the characters, superbly written. The narration shifts backwards and forwards between the boys’ school/university days, the early years of their working lives and marriages, and the immediate aftermath of an unspecified incident that takes place during the party. Such is the author’s skill that I found myself ambivalent towards each of them in turn, switching my sympathies and suspecting everyone of hidden motives. The outcome came as a surprise. Nicely done.

Compelling, disturbing, addictive and caustic.

A intoxicating brew beautifully mixed and stirred together by an author at the top of her game. No need to rehash the story but it is a wonderful account of how a chameleon tricks and wheedles his way into another's inner circle and what happens when everything comes crashing down.

Loved this book!

I thoroughly enjoyed The Party with its contemporary depiction of how the other half lives in the 21st century. Not so different from the themes in 20th century classics like The Great Gatsby, Brideshead Revisited and The Line of Beauty where an outsider, in this case Martin Gilmour, becomes obsessed with the most popular boy at school. Ben Fitzmaurice tolerates Martin and, after an incident when they are both at Cambridge together, the privileged Fitzmaurice family accept him as one of the family.

The Party of the title is Ben's 40th where the lives of Martin and Ben unravel. The ending was for me unexpected but thinking back is exactly right, knowing Martin's character so well by then. The Party is a gripping and fast paced read although I felt some of the characters were rather cliched but this didn't spoil the otherwise excellent writing. I highly recommend this to other readers. Thanks to Netgalley and Harper Collins/ Fourth Estate for the opportunity to read and review The Party.

A tale of hangers on, sycophancy and unrequited love. Martin knows his life will change the moment he steps on the train en route to boarding school. He's right, it does when he meets the charismatic Ben who is everything he is not with his privileged background. Interspersed with the past there's a police interview after an incident at a party at Ben's home. This was a great story, told well despite the characters being very unlikeable - all of them. Some might have looked nice on the outside but inside, where it matters, they were really very ugly. Wealthy and privileged they might be, but nice? - not at all, with their sense of self entitlement. This book is dark and comical in turns and I enjoyed every single page!

Reminiscent in its plot structure to "Big Little Lies" by Liane Moriaty, this engrossing tale of haves and have-nots, social climbing, obsession and more, starts with the ending, and then jumps between the past and the present to explain what actually happened and how the reader ended up where they are.
The social-climbing central character, Martin Gilmour, has gone from humble beginnings and an overbearing mother, to hanging out with the aristocracy via a scholarship to a public school and then on to Oxford Uni. He obsessively forces a friendship with Ben Fitzmaurice, creating a persona for himself that makes him agreeable to all of Ben's interests - from music, to drinking, to girls. And then he cements his friendship with a secret that neither of them want anyone else to know about, and which bonds them for life.
As they come together for Ben's 40th birthday celebrations, it is clear that the divide between them has grown, as Ben has coasted through life, his family status opening doors for him everywhere he goes, whereas Martin has had more struggles, less influence and no silver spoon with which to feast upon life's riches. However, Martin is not giving up his obsessive friendship that he has invested so much time and energy into, without a fight....
A fascinating study of the Great British class divide, with a nice side helping of obsession, jealousy, envy and pretty much all of the seven deadly sins.

An elegant party takes place in a renovated abbey in the English countryside, and what begins as an opulent display of wealth and status ends in a police investigation, where the novel begins. There are three narrative voices, and in all cases, the narrator is not what they seem. Firstly, there is Martin who is under investigation about something that happened at the party. He is managing the officer’s questions as best he can, while clearly trying to hide something. Secondly, there is Martin’s account of his own life and how he came to be sitting in the interrogation room. Thirdly, Lucy’s diary, which gives us an outside perspective on Martin, and Lucy’s life with him. Her journal exists as a way of her working out through writing what happened after the events of the party, and looking back on her marriage with Martin.

Martin is extremely unlikable but is strangely compelling. The more we see of the real Martin – disclosures in his own narrative, how the officers treat him, and how Lucy sees his relationship with his best friend, the rich, golden boy Ben, the more we realise he is not as charming or smart as he believes himself to be, and the reader can’t help but cringe for him, even as they may condemn him.

At the heart of the novel is feelings of injustice at the unfair class system in the UK, and how that affects lower income people, and particularly how woman like are doubly let down by the snobbery of both the upper classes, and the people who uphold and support it’s reign, such as Martin. Lucy is no doubt the most intelligent of the main characters, but she is ‘poor Lucy’, who they feel sorry for because she cannot be, and does not attempt to be, part of the elite class.

I read this in two sittings and thoroughly enjoyed it.

Wow, loved this.
A great cast of characters... led by Martin and Ben, best friends from private school, living their lives now as part of the David Cameron esque Cotswold set. A major episode occurred the night of Bens 40th.. the book opens onto a police interview with Martin. but what, why and by who is all unknown.

Retracing their friendships through the years, the constantly uncomfortable undercurrent of an unbalanced friendship and unrequited love and obsssion.

My favourite character was Lucy, Martins long suffering wife. But she knew it all.

Love, obsession, loyalty, money, secrets and lies. This has it all. First I've read from this author but will not be the last.

'Being around people like that - wealthy, privileged, beautiful and selfish people - is not good for the soul'

This has a definite Gatsby vibe about it as Martin gets drawn into the orbit of Ben: minor aristocracy, unassailable in his wealth, shored up by privilege and a sense of entitlement, effortlessly charming and handsome. But there's inevitably a dark side to all this power and heritage, and when things become ugly someone has to be the fall guy...

Day writes beautifully in an unobtrusive, uncluttered style yet lights her narrative with wit and insight. The multiple time/multiple narrator format is irritating (so clichéd in contemporary fiction!) as is the attempt to artificially create tension by withholding from the reader why Martin is being interviewed by the police when the novel opens and exactly what happened at the party.

Niggles aside, this is smooth and easy to read but still has important things to say about social power and the 'establishment', the way in which wealth and privilege are perpetuated and self-protective, the 'them and us' nature of British society for all the lip service to egalitarianism (we're really not 'all in it together'). There are a few places where Day seems to drop plot-lines that get started but go nowhere (Martin's nature, the bird, things his mother says about him) but overall this is a sharp and acute analysis of the abuse of power and the moral vacuities of the 'ruling classes'.

Posted on Amazon (Vine copy) and Goodreads

The Party is a dark and clever novel about privilege, obsession, and the immovable establishment in British society. Martin Gilmour went to school and university with the rich Ben Fitzmaurice and became an accepted part of his best friend’s family, but a secret in their past and their precarious relationship in the present threatens to blow apart this friendship forever and reveal that Martin was never really a part of the world he thought he had ascended to. Day’s novel exposes hypocrisy and lies in the upper classes, but also the frailty and delusion of human relationships, as Martin and his wife Lucy recount events in the past and present.

The narrative style of The Party is gripping, jumping between time in a flashback style whilst Day carefully controls how much information is given. The plot centres around a party that Ben holds for his 40th birthday and how this causes Martin to look back at the past and consider their secrets. It is a classic structure that allows a slow reveal of the past, tense as it becomes clear that this is not a simple case of boyhood friendship continued into adulthood. Martin is painted as an outsider, someone who learnt how to fit in through his relationship with Ben, leaving him reliant on his best friend, but it is clear to outsiders that this is not as simple as Martin might claim. He is an unreliable narrator and through this Day shows his obsession and how this could teeter on the edge of revenge. The other characters are less notably presented, often because Martin does not describe them objectively, but this gives the reader a sense that a lot is being covered up or rewritten.

The Party is a timely novel, poking fun at public school and Oxbridge educated, everything handed to them on a plate politicians as well as the institutions which allows those rich enough to get away with anyway. It is also a very enjoyable read for anybody who enjoys novels about the dark side of privilege and characters who get themselves into that world, but at a price.

(Note: review will be posted on my blog Fiendfully Reading closer to publication date.)