An aristocratic storyteller

The story at the heart of Snobs is profoundly - and deceptively - simple. Edith Lavery, an attractive social climber, meets and marries a scion of the anciens riches, the dull, decent Charles, Earl Broughton.

Having penetrated the highest echelons of the privileged world she once idly fantasised about in her previous life as an assistant in an estate agency, she quickly grows bored.

A fling with a handsome actor leads to her estrangement from Charles. As she sinks back down the social scale, Edith begins to wonder whether the appeals of sex and "romance" are worth the lost consolations of privilege. The question of whether or not she will return to her still loyal husband provides the fuel for the climax of the book.

The style is languorous, elegant and measured, and the vision that Fellowes gives us of what he calls the gratin - literally, the upper crust - is recorded with a cool, patrician eye.

Fellowes details the codes, rituals and habits of a world that outsiders may have otherwise assumed to have disappeared. And this is one of the great delights of this absorbing book - the depiction of this highly private and fanatically inward-looking caste that still, in the author's vision, holds social sway over the nouveaux riches and haute bourgeoisie that jostle for entry into the gilded halls of ancient privilege.

Although no outsider can possibly testify to the veracity or otherwise of this world, the finely crafted characters - from the icy snobbishness of Charles's mother, Lady Uckfield, known to intimates as Googie, to the desperate manoeuvrings of those hungry outsiders seeking an entrance to the privilege and status of Broughton Hall - have a ring of truth that could only have been sounded by someone with a ringside seat on the cynical jostlings for position and acceptance that take place around the magnetic pole of social cachet that is represented by the Broughtons.

Fellowes's (Ampleforth and Cambridge) take on this world is neither cynical nor fawning. He is nakedly critical of the selfishness, shallowness and cruelty of an elite who distribute kudos entirely on the basis of who you are and who you know.

Social interactions are invariably based on the "name exchange", a tedious circle of conversational gambits designed to probe whether or not an incomer is "one of us". Those who hold the power cling to it; those who aspire to it are invariably snubbed or mocked.

But Snobs is not a diatribe. Fellowes contends that there is something admirable in the rigid, unshakeable codes that bind this otherwise largely hollow troupe of ruthless, sneering toffs. Courtly honour still exists, in the form of the good-hearted Charles, and even the appalling Lady Uckfield is finally lauded for her strength of character in defence of her tiny, barricaded world.

Apart from its virtues as a riveting social history, this is a gripping novel crafted by someone with effortless grasp of character and dialogue that invites generous comparison with Evelyn Waugh. Fellowes invites us to shudder at and envy the snobs simultaneously. Our enthusiastic acceptance of that invitation is a tribute to his finely honed - one might even say aristocratic - abilities as a storyteller.