Review of 'After the Party' by Cressida Connolly

A surprisingly enjoyable book about posh English fascists in the 1930s, in the run-up to the war and then during the war. The main character and sometime narrator (alternating sections are told by her in the late 1970s) is called Phyliss (when did you last meet someone called Phyliss?) and she's upper-upper middle class. Her husband was a Commander in the Navy during WW1, and they've been living abroad while he works for a rubber company. Now they've come back, and they have to get their children sorted out with prep schools and so on.

And they fall among Fascists. The BUF, and then the British Union when it renames itself, is a congenial home to people like them, with a certain kind of energy and mildly nationalist and pro-Imperialist views. They might have been Tories, but it doesn't feel like a big jump for them to be Fascists instead. They're not rabid Jew-haters, though they are aware that there are such people in their movement, and that doesn't bother them much. When their daughter goes on a jape in a nearby south coast town and paints the Union Movement symbol, and the letters 'PJ' - for 'Perish Judah', a Fascist slogan - on a theatre wall, it's the social stigma attached to vandalism and damage to property that upsets them, not the slogan.

It's also a book about manners and mores, and social codes among that class and its social-class neighbours. There's a certain amount of marital infidelity, some drug-taking, and lots of awareness of class markers - social snobbery, even within the Fascist movement, is a bigger thing than racism.

I was a little worried before I read it to learn from the inside cover that Cressida Connolly has 'written for Vogue, the Telegraph, the Spectator..." but her observations and her instincts are faultless.