This Book Is Broken: "Past Imperfect" by Julian Fellowes

Well, former actress, gorgeous model and blogger Pat of Pat's Past Imperfect needn't worried about sharing book title with Julian Fellowes.

The premise: A dying gazillionaire decides to find his son as he has no heirs. Mr. Big Bucks has no idea of the identity of the son, nor the mother. He has only a "mysteriously" penned note sent anonymously to him saying, "You bastard!" Mind you, he received this decades ago, but apparently was so wrapped up in becoming a major money bag that he overlooked trying to find out who wrote it.

Mr. Big Bucks reflects on a coterie of former friends, deciding that it had to have been one of them. (Which is rather odd, because they haven't seen one another in decades, leaving the reader to think Mr. Big Bucks hadn't had any sex since then).

Hitch: All of the old friends hate him. Apparently, he did something decades ago, which split up the group while they were all vacationing in Spain. Pass the sangria, hand over the tapas. The reader gets annoyed because the event is constantly referred to throughout, but isn't revealed until the last few chapters. Once read, the scene is so dumbly operatic it doesn't ring true and worse, one doesn't care. It makes the reader wonder --do the upperclasses in the UK always vacation together or is this just a handy novel construct?

Hence, Mr. Big Bucks asks one of the group (a novelist who unbelievably has had many best sellers despite his rambling narrative) to find the mother of his mystery child. As if taken from the very good Jim Jarmusch movie Broken Flowers, starring Bill Murray, Fellowes has the protagonist look up every female in their now disparate group of friends.

Watch this movie instead. It's so much better.

And of course, the novelist who fortunately for Mr. Big Bucks is in quite a writer's funk, takes the job. He revisits old friends who unsurprisingly live desperate lives in grand country houses. (This is a different kind of Desperate Houseswives. One with very unsexy characters.)

Here's what's annoying: Had Fellowes just written it as the fluff it's supposed to be, we might have had a good jaunt. But the protagonist goes off into a self important asides about his jaundiced love life, the living condition of his remaining father, the social structure of the hoi polloi of British society. While these are interesting, they do make the book go off the rails. I couldn't keep my finger on the plot.

Fellowes, the writer of the award winning and highly enjoyable movie Gosford Park, has written what more appears to be a plan for a screenplay. In a movie one can subtly add all these elements in a way that's far more fluid. So, look for the movie. It might be better though they will have to do something to buck up the protagonist so he doesn't come off as a detached, fat oaf. My bets? The screenplay would work far better if it were allowed to be turned into a comedy. Quick. Someone bring back George Clooney and Catherine Zeta Jones.