Snobs Julian Fellowes Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 320pp, £12.99 ISBN 0297848763

In Snobs, Julian Fellowes returns to the same territory as his celebrated film Gosford Park, though in a very different age. We are now post-new Labour, but not much has changed in the lives of the superposh. Anyone who tries to join their realm is ridiculed and they can spot an interloper by a million tiny signs.

More puzzling is the behaviour of their satellites, the upper-middle-class couples who outdo themselves in their efforts to be accepted by the gentry. As the novel opens, our heroine Edith Lavery desperately wants to be married, but has the good sense to be quite discreet about it. She says pert, incomprehensible things, such as this description of her mother: "She'd have me up the aisle before you could say 'knife'." I have no idea what that means, which is probably because I'm not posh enough. I rather like it, though - which, again, is probably because I'm not posh enough.

The narrator is a Charles Ryder-ish character, common enough to delineate delicately the absurdities of the upper classes, not so common as to be excluded from their corridors, or have any unsightly chips on his shoulder. Actually, he must be posher than his Brideshead prototype, as he himself makes a terribly good match. He takes an extravagant interest in Edith, the more so when she marries Charles Broughton, some earl. He is also profoundly interested in the Broughtons generally; but, given that as an ensemble they lack variety and charm (dull dad, scheming ma, dull son, parvenue daughter-in-law), you'd be hard pushed to say why.

His principal interest, however, is in the minute workings of the aristocracy, the rules of which he explains in exhaustive detail. Aristos like the country more than London; aristos don't complain; they say one thing but mean another; they giggle when middle-class people try to impress them by buying them posh foods. This laboured analysis makes the novel seem dated. In a world of PlayStations and iMacs, when people can remember rules as complex as those of Grand Theft Auto, the simplicity of a bunch of grabby toffs does not need anything like this much exposition, and only the most craven lickspittle would ever think it did.

Much of the writing is finely turned: people lunch in "one of those Italian restaurants where waiters shout"; Edith is very soon "bored to sobs with her marriage" (though I remember that line being delivered by Kristin Scott Thomas in Gosford Park, and it's a little too good to use twice). Honeymooning couples leave the reception in vehicles that you have to Google (did you know what a barouche-landau was?) and cheekily lofty analogies are made - "Old Lady Uckfield had been Queen Mary to her daughter- in-law's Lady Elizabeth Bowes and the relationship was never warm". As a prole, that's what I want from a novel about the very well bred - descriptions of a bunch of people I've never heard of, not a tiresome explanation of rules I could have made up, and a mishmash of Debrett's and the screenplay of Dangerous Liaisons.

Many of the observations on Englishness are acute, and there is a very well-drawn cad (if a rather slavish homage to John Beaver in A Handful of Dust), but the central idea of the novel is its undoing. The assumption is that these people, although they have no souls, are interesting just by being gentlefolk. They are not, and this leaves a void where the intellectual weight should be. Fellowes thinks he's Evelyn Waugh, when in fact he is Jilly Cooper. But what the hell? I love Jilly Cooper.

Zoe Williams is a columnist on the Guardian

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