To begin with the guests: what kind of people were they, these men and women who spent their days killing things and changing clothes? Were they stupid and dull as their detractors insisted? Or were they charming and filled with a sense of benevolent duty as the nostalgists would have us believe? Above all, why were they performing these rituals? What was to be gained by shooting sixty, eighty, a hundred days a year? And hunting or fishing for most of those that remained? What was it all for? What was the point, as they endlessly mounted those great staircases to struggle in or out of yet another outfit? Even in 1914, upper-class women were changing clothes four or fives times a day and the men not much less. Those endless dinners, those glittering, identical balls, those interchangeable house parties, every event governed by the same cast-iron rules. But why? And the servants, rising at dawn and working until nightfall, servicing these Chinese ceremonies of kaleidoscopic, social interchange – what was going on in their minds?

In order to perform her dissection of the Edwardian creed, Isabel Colegate chooses to mount a proto-typical context: twenty-four hours in the life of a shooting party which takes place in a large house at the centre of a large estate. It is important to grasp that this is not a ‘great house’ as such. Nor are the Nettlebys a ‘great family’. Some of the members of the gathering had formed part of the coterie around the pleasure-loving King, so lately dead, and even Lady Nettleby had been a Royal favourite, but Sir Randolph himself is not one of these. He is a baronet and rich enough in his way but he is really just a gentleman, a landowner, and not a star of high society. Right from the start, Colegate demonstrates her evenhandedness when it comes to assessing the value of Sir Randolph and people like the Nettlebys as social types, when she chooses Sir Reuben Hergesheimer, the brilliant Jewish financier, to do it:

It was only after the King’s death that Sir Reuben had come to know and like Minnie’s husband. Through him he had come to admire a sub-section of the eternally fascinating English class system with which he had not previously been so familiar. He had known grandees, such of the high aristocracy who were intimates of the King’s, and he had known naturally the financial world of the City, the bankers and merchant princes, but he had not much come across the country gentry, though he was familiar with their historic role. He saw them now as a class which could command his sympathy. He saw Sir Randolph as a representative of an admirable way of life, now threatened by forces which he himself had done a certain amount to encourage.

This, the reader will suspect, is not only Sir Reuben’s estimation of Sir Randolph but Colegate’s, too. And this is the skill of the book. She is harsh to some of these representatives of the old world but the novel is by no means a blanket condemnation of them. It is not a fashionable socialist polemic – which was, lest we forget – the only treatment generally meted out to people like the Nettlebys at the time of her writing. Instead, The Shooting Party is an attempt to sift the good from the bad. The author invites us to find the reasons for the collapse of this existence, to seek out those areas where its principles had become corrupted and mis-routed, but also to be aware of what has been lost that was good. Viewed from the moral and social chaos of the late twentieth century, for the honest man or woman, there was much to be said for an ordered, structured world, more than would ever have been acknowledged by the 60s liberationists. In the climate then existing among the British intelligentsia, for a serious writer with a reputation to defend, this was very little short of courageous.