The Party

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.

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.

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.