Like every other chronically online person you know, I rushed out to see Saltburn at the cinema as soon as it came out. I’ve read a lot of praise and a lot of criticism of the film. Personally, I loved it. I think a lot of the critique comes from people hoping to find something that was never there to be found: meaningful class analysis. Director Emerald Fennell attended one of the most expensive day schools in the country before going on to study at Oxford. As far as I was concerned, she was never going to create an angry, gritty, ‘eat the bourgeoise’ narrative because, well, she is the bourgeoise. Since I did not go in expecting a celluloid rendering of Das Kapital, I was not disappointed. Saltburn was fun, sexy, disgusting, weird and all the other things I hoped it would be, with Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s rightful resurrection a delicious bonus.
(This post will contain spoilers of the film, although I imagine that by now nobody has managed to avoid them.)
Saltburn tells the story of Oliver Quick, an apparently deeply disadvantaged first year student at Oxford University who befriends rich, popular heartthrob Felix Catton and is invited to spend a summer at his family estate, the titular Saltburn. Just like the character in Blur’s Country House, who spends his days ‘reading Balzac, knocking back Prozac’ in his ‘very big house in the country’, Oliver soon realises that the Cattons are deeply privileged and deeply troubled. The first shot of Oliver walking into Saltburn tell us everything we need to know, as a wide camera angle takes in a crystal chandelier strung with fly paper peppered with dead flies. This is a place of opulence and excess, but also of something steadily rotting just beneath its beautiful surface.
In one of the film’s earlier revelations, we learn that Oliver is not the working class hero he branded himself when he first met Felix. In fact, he is relatively privileged himself - just not quite as privileged as he would like to be. Through this twist, Fennell escapes what could have been a disastrous series of pitfalls in working class representation, and focuses instead on middle class anxieties - the frantic desire to be upper class, twinned with a bitter resentment toward those who actually are. Oliver becomes the Catton family’s quiet observer, their captive audience member and eventually their deliberate provocateur, pushing them as far as they will go and watching gleefully as they fall.
The parallels between Nick Guest, the narrator of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker winning novel The Line of Beauty and Saltburn’s Oliver Quick are striking. Like Oliver, Nick is decidedly middle class. Both boys attend Oxford and establish obsessive friendships with wealthier peers; Oliver with Felix Catton and Nick with Toby Fedden. When summer rolls around, marking the end of first year for Oliver and graduation for Nick, both boys are invited by their upper class friends to spend time at their family homes. It in in these houses - the Cattons’ sprawling country estate in Saltburn and the Feddens’ luxurious Notting Hill home in The Line of Beauty - that class anxieties tip over into all-consuming infatuations with wealth and privilege.
Fennell lists The Line of Beauty among the literary influences of the film alongside Brideshead Revisited and Atonement and to begin with, the narrative resemblance is striking. Where the stories divert is the impact of this outsiderdom on the central characters. In Saltburn, Oliver’s lustful longing for the new world he finds himself in turns him into a beautiful monster. In The Line of Beauty, Nick is a gay man living openly in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, monstrous only in the eyes of a conservative, homophobic upper class who never quite accept him, keeping him always in the box room and at the far end of the dining table.
In both stories, it seems as though the houses themselves that are to blame for the fates of the young men who enter them. The homes are beautiful, but offer their occupants no real comfort. This is also the idea at the heart of Dinah Brooke’s recently rediscovered novel Lord Jim at Home. First published in 1973 and reprinted last year, exactly 50 years later, by McNally Editions in the states and Daunt Books here in the UK, it is a grimly horrifying account of Giles Trenchard, a young boy born into immense privilege and very little love. Over the course of his young life, he is met with only aversion and hostility, resulting in him becoming a strange and unhappy young man who, despite the apparent promise of his ‘honest, reliable, open English face’ eventually commits an act of terrible violence.
Much of Giles’s suffering happens in the home, where the story starts and ends. A particularly shocking episode which takes place at dinner sees him sat alone after unwittingly disappointing his stern father: ‘The room is dark, with a cold blueish light outlining the heavy furniture, and the picture frames, and the small boy in his sailor suit.’ The book is full of suffering and pain, but it this image, of the little boy in his Sunday best sat in the big, cold room, dwarfed by everything around him, that really stuck with me long after I finished reading.
In her foreword to the republished edition, Ottessa Moshfegh (whose most recent novel Lapvona presents its own searing takedown of the revolting and ridiculous behaviour of the upper classes) calls Lord Jim at Home ‘an accurate portrayal of how fucked-up people behave, artfully conveyed in a way that nice people are too polite to admit they understand.’ Giles, despite his obvious privilege, has the bad fortune to be raised by two people either too disinterested or too perplexed by him to treat him with any affection. His home, which should in theory be a place of comfort and luxury, acts as his third tormentor. On the cover of the Daunt Books edition, it sits at the top of a hill, with nothing around it for many miles, looking sternly down at the reader.
A lavish property also acts as a malevolent force in Wish Her Safe At Home, a delightfully camp and eccentric novel by Stephen Benatar, first published in 1982 and reissued in 2010 by the New York Review of Books imprint NYRB Classics. When Rachel Waring inherits a Georgian mansion from her great aunt, she becomes a ‘person of property’ and finds herself deliriously happy in her new circumstance: ‘I could read a novel during the journey; go to any type of restaurant I fancied; have a silly little sense of adventure.’
The moment Rachel steps inside the house, she knows she wants to live there, describing it to her surprised lawyer as ‘practically seductive.’ The house, with its greying net curtains and its rotting woodwork, needs a lot doing to it and Rachel is more than happy to bankrupt herself in the process, building herself a shrine to faded glamour, luxury and old Hollywood, ‘my own small kingdom, where marvellous and curative things could happen.’ Her descent from outlandish to absolutely unhinged seems inextricably tied to the house and to one of its former residents, whom she begins to worship with a frenzied sense of adoration.
Another hidden gem uncovered by NYRB Classics is Caroline Blackwood’s Great Granny Webster. I first encountered Blackwood in this substack post by author Camilla Grudova, who described her as Northern Ireland’s lost great writer. Great Granny Webster was first published in 1977 and shortlisted for that year’s Booker prize, but fell regrettably out of print in the UK alongside the rest of her work.
This slim novella is split into four chapters, each focusing on a different female relation of the narrator, each set against the backdrop of their respective homes. In the first chapter, we meet the eponymous Great Granny Webster, a ‘formidable old woman dressed in black’ who ‘seemed to hate colours.’ Great Granny Webster eschews all frivolity and spends her days sat in a hard-backed chair in her in her ‘large cold villa’ in Hove. Next, we encounter the narrator’s Aunt Lavinia. A stark contrast to the family’s austere matriarch, she is a glamorous but tortured woman with more than a touch of Saltburn’s Venetia Catton and The Line of Beauty’s Catherine Fedden. Cocooned in her luxurious apartment, she has surrounded herself with beautiful things but still cannot find a way to be happy.
It is through Lavinia’s perspective in the third chapter that we are finally introduced to the narrator’s grandmother (based on Blackwood’s own) who lost her youth and sanity holed up in the family estate Dunmartin Hall, ‘an immense grey isolated house that was so cold you had to put on an overcoat to walk through its halls.’ Dunmartin Hall takes inspiration from Clandeboye, the country estate where Blackwood lived as a child, and is ‘a gigantic monument to more prosperous and eternally lost times, dominating the countryside in its stately dilapidation.’
This period at Dunmartin is retold through the snatched memories and anecdotes of family friend Tommy Redcliffe, most of which involve the narrator’s grandmother’s hallucinations, disturbances and late night disappearances. Tommy shudders when he recalls the conditions of the manor house, with its collapsing ceiling hung with ‘long sweet sticky brown papers for catching flies’ in a description eerily reminiscent of Oliver’s arrival at Saltburn, and all the decadence and decay that image told of.
Books about big country houses are easy to come by, but are often either deeply romanticised fairy tales or straight-up haunted house horrors. What I enjoyed about each of these stories is that they toe the line between beauty and brutality, handing you a glass of champagne while steering you away from the locked doors and grimy back passages just out of view.
An Elite Reading List
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke
Wish Her Safe At Home by Stephen Benatar
Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood