We’ve already got it in Chapter 1: when the family spend the summer in their French holiday home, Nick is delegated to look after ‘the Cat’ – the family’s arch nickname for Catherine, Toby’s troubled younger sister. But it’s never referred to again, the party ends up being a high-profile status-fest for the benefit of Gerald Fedden, and… we get the picture.
Nick and Toby, the friend he’s had a crush on since day one at Oxford, will be 21 within a few days of each other, and there’s a genuine-sounding family conversation about a joint party. He’s Nick, as in Nick Carraway, the narrator of The Great Gatsby who is always observing from the outside, and he’s, well, Guest as in guest.ĭid Jane Austen invent the plot device of the poor relation who is welcomed into the house, supposedly on terms of equality, but who is never actually treated as an equal? In Mansfield Park Fanny Price is treated with scorn by the spoilt cousins. He’s learnt the tunes of the culture he’s immersed himself within – literally, in the case of the Mozart piece he has a stab at sight-reading, but also the art in the nice houses, the right novelists, the furniture his father buys and sells – but he can never be an insider. He’s constantly out of his depth: when he appears to be keeping his head above the water, he isn’t really. One of the things I like about it now is Nick Guest, and the way he tries to fit into a social milieu that is, at heart, indifferent to him.
I first read this six or seven years ago when it had just won the Booker Prize and I can remember enjoying it then.
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