Past Imperfect by Julian Fellowes

GIVEN only a few months to live, software tycoon Damian Baxter summons an old chum with whom he has fallen out violently many years earlier and asks him to try to track down the love child he has never met but now wishes to leave a fortune well in excess of £500 million.

The reluctant friend and narrator of the events that follow is supplied with a list of the five possible mothers of the lucky bastard — and, insulting though he finds it, a credit card with which to pay any little expenses on the way..

Past Imperfect contains eerie echoes of both Gosford Park, for which Julian Fellowes wrote the Oscar-winning screenplay, and his subsequent novel, Snobs. All three focus on the upper classes at their worst and all three have a paternity issue at their heart. The exciting thing about this new saga is that it moves back and forth between the imperfections of the Swinging Sixties and the muggings, binge-drinking and "celebrity" cult of the present day.

Into this wonky and precarious world strides the young, ambitious, good-looking visionary Damian Baxter. Boasting that he is "a perfectly ordinary boy from a perfectly ordinary home", this lower-middleclass lad gate-crashes the grandest balls, shows off, throws punches and seduces all the debs. Loved by the girls, hated by the men — one potential father-in-law calls him "a smarmy little oik & with his clothes from Marks and Spencer" — his adventures in high society end in catastrophe. We know that something absolutely terrible has happened in a villa in Portugal but don't get the grisly details till the last chapter. We also know, of course, that Damian Baxter will do wonderfully well in the end.

This semi-Proustian pursuit of lost times leads us into some bleak new worlds. We inspect the homes that the ex-debs live in now — one house is so untidy it looks as though a terrorist bomb has exploded in it — and meet some of the "mannerless toads" they have married. Spitting out crêpe suzette onto his plate, one horrible husband splutters, "What the hell is this made of ? Soap?" Scattered among these savage set-pieces — a drugs raid at a party at Madame Tussauds is another highlight — are hilariously authoritative mini-essays on changing toffdom, Royal Ascot, life peerages and deposed royalty. During the final tear-jerking "nightmare in the sun", Damian tells the chastened narrator that he is "a regular little toady, a Johnny-on-the-make, creeping and crawling like a bumboy".

A few pages later, we at last discover the unlikely identity of the mystery love child and how he, or she, was conceived. In the process, we have had a gloriously funny, bumpy ride through modern times..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Damian Baxter is hugely wealthy and dying. He lives alone in a big house in Surrey, looked after by a chauffeur, butler, cook and housemaid. He has but one concern - his fortune in excess of 500 million and who should inherit it on his death. PAST IMPERFECT is the story of a quest. Damian Barker wishes to know if he has a living heir. By the time he married in his late thirties he was sterile (the result of adult mumps), but what about before that unfortunate illness? He was not a virgin. Had he sired a child? A letter from a girlfriend from these times suggests he did. But the letter is anonymous. Damian contacts someone he knew from their days at university. He gives him a list of girls he slept with and sets him a task: find his heir!