Oxford Blood by Antonia Fraser
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Bloody Awful

Antonia Fraser is a person for whom silver spoons were invented. So I suppose her fictional work must be about the privileged media luvvies who feasibly share her background. Characters named Jemima, Cy, Cass are giveaways. The little white Mercedes sports car fills out the picture. Locations like Holland Park and Oxford let the reader know what sort of people these are; they’re of course people like her. One must write about what one knows, mustn’t one?

Do the rich not bleed? Of course they do. And they have secrets like everyone else that they’d rather not be made public. Their wealth and position of course are the only reason anyone would find their secrets even remotely interesting. That’s what sells newspapers (the book was written in those ancient times before the web and DNA testing). And presumably they were expected to be the reasons people would buy Fraser’s book.

I can’t think of any other reason to invest one’s time in Oxford Blood other than as an unintentionally ironic guide to English upper class mores and speech patterns. There’s little else in it worth bothering about. The premise of a dead baby swapped for a living one in order to continue a noble family line is trite as well as absurd. The contradiction of action and intention is all too obvious. The premise might serve (just) as the foundation for an episode of Midsomer Murders. But it’s more likely that it wouldn’t make it past the first script-editing conference.

The baby in question has grown by late adolescence into a Boris Johnson-like japester on the razzle in The Oxford Bloods, a rough imitation of the Bullingdon Club, an association of rich knob-heads who wreak drunken havoc in only the best Oxford eating establishments and rate the success of their nights out by the size of the bill for damages. Think Brideshead Revisited but without the restraining influence of old-fashioned college porters and limited family allowances. Others may quarrel with my taste, but it has never been my ambition - literary or otherwise - to know much about such people. To be aware that they exist as symbols of inherited privilege and intensive inbreeding is more than enough.

I suppose that England needs these genetic remnants of the Norman Conquest. They do provide comic relief during times of national crisis. Eccentricity, however, sails perilously close to buffoonery. One might ask why the Lady Antonia would write about such drivel. The answer, I think, is simply that she can, and therefore does. Lots of similar folk are there for encouragement and support. No mystery about that.

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