Synopses & Reviews
This ingenious and inventive novel from the award-winning author of Jem (and Sam) at once comprises an autobiography of Aldous (Gus) Cotton, an English civil servant with breathing problems and chronic sexual learning difficulties, and an erratic history of modern England. It is also and more so the story of Helen Hardress, the serious, slim, blond young woman who quickens Gus's pulse when they first meet in Normandy one summer in the early 1960s as she will, off and on, for the next twenty years. For no one's life is quite the same once Helen Hardress has passed through it. Least of all, that of the long-pining Gus. "Reading Ferdinand Mount is as much fun as pink gin."—Michael Gorra, New York Times Book Review "Fairness is funny, touching, picaresque, decked out with eccentric characters, improbable, artful and, rarest of all, unfailingly entertaining."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World "A quick, witty read with resonance."—Baltimore Sun
Review
"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,..." Christopher Hitchens, Atlantic Online (read Atlantic Online's entire review)
Synopsis
Brilliantly interweaving the events that have defined, and sometimes shattered, modern times with the extraordinary adventures of colorful characters, this vividly realized novel is at once an autobiography of the fictional Aldous Cotton, an English civil servant with breathing problems and chronic sexual difficulties, and an erratic history of England in the latter decades of the twentieth century. It is also the story of Helen. A tiny, blond, serious girl when she first meets the narrator during a summer vacation in Normandy, Helen has set as her goal a morally satisfying life. Yet she continually finds herself in situations neither satisfying nor moral, from the mining boom in Central Africa to the child abuse scandals of the late 1980s. Caustic but irresistible in her innocence, a modern female Candide, Helen everywhere leaves her mark, for no one else's life is quite the same once she's passed by.
Synopsis
This vividly realized novel is at once an autobiography of the fictional Aldous Cotton--an English civil servant with breathing problems and chronic sexual difficulties--and an erratic history of England in the latter decades of the 20th century. It is also the story of Helen, a modern female Candide who everywhere leaves her mark, for no one else's life is quite the same once she's passed by.