Fairness
by  Ferdinand Mount

A Review by Christopher Hitchens

When we quote L. P. Hartley in saying "The past is another country. They do things differently there," we utter a sort of tautology. Of course the past is another country; of course its inhabitants have a tendency to behave oddly. This is no more than to say that the past is past, or is not the present. Certain novelists have the ability to challenge this remorselessly obvious verdict – to narrow the divide between youth and maturity and to make both states, if not countries, real and immediate. On the evidence of this novel Ferdinand Mount is one of them.

I'll take a wild guess and say that for most people trying to recollect adolescence in tranquillity, the madeleine surrogate is likely to be early sexual awakening. It is so for the English and asthmatic Gus Cotton (the "Gus," counterintuitively, is short for Aldous). In the 1960s the teenage Gus is tutoring the sickly children of a rich American family in Normandy. Out of the sun-dispersed mist on the sands appears to him the compact blonde figure of Helen Hardress, an English nanny working for some shady Iranians. The refulgence of the first sighting is not designed to deceive anybody; this girl with the forbidding name might be described as trouble with a capital H. From the first I was able to see her as one of those blondes who is entirely female but not in the least bit feminine; a recipe for misery among boys down the ages.

They used to say that none but the brave deserve the fair; Gus isn't particularly brave in any case, and he soon discovers that fairness has nothing to do with it. The Normandy episode ends badly: he is seduced (at least into heavy petting) by the lady of the house, who then becomes convinced that he is carrying on with another girl. He falls into the company of a huge, boisterous, and slightly sinister American tycoon. In fact, most of his emotional future is to be conditioned by this one calamitous summer at the seaside.

Of Gus's background we learn little, but some English racetrack chancers, described as cronies of his father's, put one in mind of the cheats and swindlers in John Le Carrι's A Perfect Spy. And Gus himself, as he gradually discloses, is as an adult a minor functionary in the constipated little world of British intelligence. Part of his professional life, that is to say, consists of attaching himself like a barnacle to other people. His private life is the same: he picks up lukewarm friendships in any milieu where Helen can be found. The young men with whom she associates are anything but impressive, and Gus's self-esteem deflates as he slowly comes to understand that she will sleep with anyone – has slept with everyone – but him.

This crushing realization comes by way of a splendid roster of minor English characters, created by Mount for our amusement and Gus's torment. The scrofulous, self-pitying travel agent and racing-car enthusiast; the saloon-bar boaster and minor crook; the cynical, near sadistic gossip writer; the smooth, ruthless, arriviste civil servant – Helen beds them all and marries at least two of them, but she won't give the man who truly loves her the time of day, unless she needs a shoulder to cry on or a crisis dealt with. And he makes himself abjectly, eternally available. The measure of his almost canine subservience is the bliss he experiences when, as if on a whim, the little minx gives him a brisk, unsolicited, alfresco manual caress. But this offhand consolation (if I may be allowed the phrase) is poor recompense for what Gus has just been through. Visiting Helen in Africa, where she has gone to work for a dubious mining company, he discovers that the boss of the mine is the ghastly American tycoon and that she and the tycoon have been...

This loosely plotted action is held together by a couple of recurring gags (Gus can't shake the contacts he made in his past, and he can't finish any of the classic novels he tries to read) and by the author's deftness with period. In a few sentences Mount can evoke the Britain of the 1960s and 1970s, the Thatcher years, and the onset of the present. In other words, Gus carries this torch for the yellow-haired girl for decades. If he has had any other love life, we don't get to hear about it; a joyless later encounter with his former seaside employer leads to impotence on his part and – as if to underline the point that life is unfair – a series of Corsican revenges on hers.

The Englishness of it all is extraordinary; even when Gus goes to America in Her Majesty's service, he encounters only grotesques and caricatures of the sort one might encounter in a William Boyd pastiche. (And he gets drunk and makes a fool of himself like an Evelyn Waugh "innocent" abroad.) By the close Gus is middle-aged and used up and afflicted chiefly by feelings of pointlessness and waste. He has, though he never thinks of it this way, lost his life back there on the beaches of Normandy. Yeats was a great sucker for yellow hair, as Mount reminds us, and this book is at one level a literary reworking of Anita Loos's dictum that gentlemen prefer blondes. "She ties men up in knots," one character says of Helen to Gus, "just because her hair looks like a bunch of hay. If her follicles had a different juice in them, you wouldn't think twice about her." There are plenty of words for dark hair, of course, but once you've run through "raven" and "midnight black," you are pretty much finished for poetic purposes. Perhaps there just seem to be more synonyms for blonde – "honey," "flaxen," "golden," and so forth. Above all, though, the word "fair" is an ancient word for "beautiful." In our day it has acquired a second relationship, with the banal, as in "fairly good," "fair enough." The abyss between these meanings is the one that swallows up poor Aldous.