Elizabeth Day’s One of Us deploys one of fiction’s most reliable formulas. It is the structure behind Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley, and more recently Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn: a socially awkward, aspirant outsider attaches himself to a privileged golden boy. He becomes indispensable, is ushered into the glamorous old-money fold, and proves sharper than anyone imagines. The result is a contest between class and cunning. Day applies this template to contemporary Britain with striking results.
The novel opens with Martin, a middling academic, embittered and self-loathing, whose voice Day captures with surgical precision. It is the voice of the British professorial class: icy restraint, immaculate contempt and, just behind it, the abyss. In therapy after “cultural sensitivity issues”, he complains about the undergraduate who cancelled him: a boy in a pearl necklace.
“It was tricky enough to know what gender anyone was these days without the added confusion,” he grumbles. His testimony, framed as a therapeutic exercise, begins as a skewering of his therapist but soon reveals the deeper wound: his broken friendship with Ben Fitzmaurice.
Once inseparable from his glamorous schoolfriend, Martin was cast out after a disastrous 40th birthday party. Seven years later he is invited back into the Fitzmaurice world and sees his chance for revenge.
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Around this relationship, Day assembles a vivid tableau of privilege. Ben, now a political star, is tipped as the next prime minister. His wife Serena strains against her gilded cage; their daughter Cosima embraces environmental activism in defiance of her family’s values. A disgraced MP plots his return, while Fliss, the family’s black sheep, haunts the narrative in death. Shifting perspectives expose not only Martin’s corrosive envy but also the innocent love and longing from which it mutated.
Day writes with intelligence, wit and a coldly observant eye. Her satire is precise but never overdrawn, capturing the self-delusions of the wealthy with cool restraint. The archetypes are familiar but her control of tone and timing keeps the story taut. One of Us is an engrossing, darkly funny account of envy and power, and also a tightly constructed thriller exposing the black hole at the heart of privilege.
