The Shooting Party

Earl Grey tea goes well with English lit.

Author: Isabel Colegate

Category: This is the first time I’ve read this one. I discovered it while perusing reviews on amazon.com.

My thoughts: It took a minute for me to get into this book, but I really liked it. It did more to satiate my Downton Abbey cravings than Snobs. The Shooting Party, in fact, has some similarities to Downton. Both are set just before World War I and have an upstairs/downstairs vibe going on. The Shooting Party is set in the fall of 1913 at the estate of Sir Randolph Nettleby. He has invited a group of people to his estate for a shooting party. The action takes place less than a year before those fateful guns of August, and the threat of war is very much in the air. Colegate writes, “By the time the next season came round a bigger shooting party had begun, in Flanders.” It’s an ominous feeling reading about these characters, knowing that the very fabric of their lives would be rent in less than a year. There’s a parallel between the shoot and the brutality of war—the men in the story pick off pheasants left and right in a methodical way that foreshadows the mechanized warfare that was World War I.

I had to take notes on the characters, because there are quite a few of them. Aside from Sir Randolph, there is his wife Minnie, who may or may not have had an affair with King Edward VII (Minnie reminded me a bit of the Duchess of Cornwall), Lord Gilbert Hartlip, who is a renowned shooter, and his wife Aline, who is having an affair with Charles Farquhar, a fellow guest. Bob Lilburn, another guest, is there with his wife Olivia, who is smitten with fellow guest Lionel Stephens. Also, there is Cecily, Sir Randolph’s nineteen-year-old granddaughter, who is enjoying a flirtation with Tibor Rakassyi, a visiting Hungarian count. My favorite character is Osbert, Sir Randolph’s eccentric young grandson who has a pet duck.

The “downstairs” people include Glass, head groundskeeper of the Nettleby estate, and his son Dan, who shows a proclivity to science that is encouraged by Sir Randolph and looked upon skeptically by Glass himself. Also, there is Ellen, Cecily’s maid, who is in love with John, one of Sir Randolph’s footmen. There’s also Cornelius Cardew, an anti-blood sport fanatic who plans to “educate” those present at the shooting party about the perils of what they are doing.

I remember having to learn the causes of World War I in my high school history class, one of which was nationalism—the kind that is actually jingoism. And it’s very much on display here. Both upstairs and downstairs people believe Britain and the British Empire are the bees-knees. Ida, Sir Randolph’s daughter-in-law and Cecily’s mother, states that her husband is against Cecily marrying “anyone except an Englishman” (too bad for Tibor Rakassyi). Dan Glass liked “being part of an Empire that he had been told at school and had found no difficulty in believing was the best there had ever been.” There’s a very Kipling-esque vibe here. The Shooting Party gives a snapshot of a time when the sun never set on the Empire—an Empire that began to unravel when World War I was over.

Isabel Colegate’s writing reminded me of Maud Martha, in that both are written in a simple and profound way. There are no chapters in The Shooting Party, oddly enough. But this makes the story flow better. It’s just plain old damn good fiction. It’s a beautifully written novel, and I’m sure I’ll read this one again.

Great passage: He would have been surprised to learn that Sir Randolph, unlike Minnie who aspired to it, considered cosmopolitanism a vice. It was all right to know your way around Paris, Sir Randolph thought, and to visit Italian picture galleries or the relics of the classical world, but generally speaking a man should stick to one country and be proud of it. If one wanted to travel there was always the Empire.

Up next: The Guns of August (continuing the World War I theme)