“The British society mechanism never seems to change and it doesn’t allow people to move up or down,” Mackie tells the BBC.
“We understand it in a weirdly unspoken way that other countries don’t.”
It is easy to imagine these two characters as real-life individuals.
Anthony seems like someone who could appear as one of the millionaire investors on Dragon’s Den, whilst in the book itself, Olivia is referenced as someone who frequents the pages of glossy high society magazine Tatler.
Mackie herself has spoken about her obsession with these publications when she was growing up, and how they have shaped her interest in the lives of the upper classes – or as she calls them “ghost citizens”.
“We can never fully see them, it’s kind of a new phenomenon because there have always been super-rich people who can do whatever they want, but there is a new kind of 1%,” she says.
“They can get away with whatever they want because they’re not really conforming to the same rules or standards as everyone else”.
Mackie says “because we can’t see [them], I’ve tried to imagine it”.
