by JULIET WATERS

At its core, Bella Pollen's novel Hunting Unicorns isn't really much more than a summer read, but it does have a serious point to make. We don't usually associate poverty with people who own vast estates. In England, however, there are apparently high-ranking, dangerously eccentric, chronically alcoholic peers of the British aristocracy living in secret abject squalor. They have homes, yes - estates with probably thousands of acres. But they don't have the money, skills or sanity to take care of these places or even themselves.

It's an interesting premise for a novel, even if makes for a pretty morose romantic comedy. Still, this hasn't stopped Hunting Unicorns from being a huge success in the U.K. - last year it became one of the biggest summer reads of 2004. It's unlikely the loss of the titled class will resonate with the same poignancy here, but it's an interesting harbinger of what to expect from British popular fiction. In the works is a new film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, the '80s phenomenon that introduced the world at large to Jeremy Irons and British homoeroticism. Hunting Unicorns is also being adapted for the screen, though no one would confuse Bella Pollen, the former fashion designer who wrote it, with Waugh.

From the first chapters it's clear this novel is pitched at the same smart chick lit readers who were drawn to Bridget Jones. The first Jones we meet, however, is more of a lad lit character, The Viscount Daniel Lytton-Jones. A barely competent alcoholic from a long ancestry of alcoholics, he's a potentially interesting cad. Despite lineage that would make him a cousin to William and Harry, he's become a journalist. This may be because he can actually write when he's not too drunk, or too sober, but it also has something to do with a crisis in family capital.

Maggie Monroe is a second-generation lefty New York television journalist. She'd rather be covering the Middle East, or hanging out with her hot Doctor Without Borders boyfriend, but instead she's been assigned a ratings puff piece on the decline of the British aristocracy. You might think you see what's coming, but like Daniel, who gets knocked off by a bus in the first chapter, you don't.

Rather, Daniel becomes a ghost who narrates the trials and tribulations of his more responsible, sober younger brother, Rory, who has become a social worker/publicist for the hopeless gentry. Rory, uncomfortable with titledom, introduces himself to Maggie as Rory Jones. It's hate at first sight, usually an important ingredient in classic romantic satire. Sparks fly as Maggie gets closer and closer to uncovering his family secret: that his parents are charming but impoverished alcoholics, and that his grandfather may have some Nazi collaboration in his past.

The result is a kind of mutation between Brideshead and Bridget, but without the all important bad boys, since Pollen is clearly working as hard as she can to nurse our pity for these neglected peers of a dying world. Maggie, sadly, is no Bridget. She's such an ambitious, annoying poster girl for the worst aspects of meritocracy that you kind of want better for Rory. But I suspect there will soon be more heroes like him. Maybe we'll even find them online soon: Eldest son, not a drunk, seeking spunky resourceful North American girl to turn family estate into organic farm, wildlife preserve, hotel, UN heritage site, nursing home etc.

Like the PR firm that made Camilla Parker Bowles seem refreshingly old and ordinary, this new fairy tale wants us to believe that the rich really are kind of like us. We don't know it but they harbour secret, deep desires to be like us. To feel entitled to de-clutter their lives from those mouldy old ancestral obligations. All they need, really, is a little love to get them on their way.

Hunting Unicorns by Bella Pollen, Grove Press, pb, 354pp, $17.95