The Shooting Party

by Isabel Colegate

Julian Fellowes (Introduction)

'Threads of romance, social comment, country lore and intrigue both above and below stairs are cunningly worked together to create a brilliant tapestry' Sunday Telegraph

It is 1913 - a breath away from the Great War - and Edwardian England is about to vanish into history. An assorted group of men and women gather at Sir Randolph Nettleby's estate for a shooting party. Opulent, adulterous, moving assuredly through the rituals of eating and slaughter, they are an era's dazzlingly obtuse and brilliantly decorative finale.

A quiet, elegant meditation on class frustration and the transience of human concern, The Shooting Party is also the inspiration behind one of the great landmarks of popular culture - Downtown Abbey.

• ISBN10: 0141188677
• ISBN13: 9780141188676
• Publish Date: 4 January 2007 (first published 1 July 1982)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint: Penguin Classics
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 224
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/isbn/9780141188676

Reviews

[brokentune]

2.5*

‘Is it really so bad?’ asked Olivia. ‘The countryside looks so beautiful and the people so happy.’
‘They’re having a hard time. We hear a lot these days about factory workers and conditions in slums. No one bothers about rural poverty – we deal with it locally of course as best we can but when there’s no money in land there’s no money for charity. No one cares about country people. All the attention goes to the towns.’
‘I should have thought that every English person’s deepest idea of England was of the country. Doesn’t England mean a village green, and smoke rising from cottage chimneys, and the rooks cawing in the elms, and the squire and the vicar and the schoolmaster and the jolly villagers and their rosy-cheeked children?’
‘It has not existed for many years now.’
‘It must exist. How could we all believe in it so if it didn’t exist?’
‘Exactly. We believe in it. That is why the idea is such a powerful one. It is a myth.’

Oh, I should have liked this book more than I did, I really should.

Isabel Colegate created a little gem of Edwardiana here. It's historical fiction, but doesn't read like it. Stylistically, The Shooting Party was fantastic.

What turned me off was that the book is very short but tries to address so many aspects of the dying days of the world of Britain before the Great War that I thought it was all a bit crammed. When it wasn't trying to convince me that a house party would cover so many topics of conversation - while also spending a lot of time changing clothes, and getting to know each other, and conducting private affairs - I was fairly bored every time we got to the actual shooting.

And apart from one character who haunts this book, I never got the feeling of ever getting to know the people who are coming together at this house party. Maybe this would have worked better if the book had been longer. Or maybe this was the author's intention - to keep the characters at a distance from the reader. But then, if Colegate had intended this, why give some of the characters interior lives and flesh them out?

I really don't know. All I know is that I felt anxious about one character for the entire read: the duck.