Synopses & Reviews
Although Jeremiah Mount receives only passing notice in the celebrated diary of Samuel Pepys, in Jem's own memoirs Sam figures significantly and large -- not as a fellow clerk in Oliver Cromwell's government but as an ill-natured, galling colleague and measly mouse of a man who sets the professionally envious Jem on a hapless path of revenge. Their personal destinies criss-crossing to wildly ironic ends, Jem (and Sam) not only pursue worldly successes and their erotic whims in a bustling, boisterous city of London. They also survive war, rebellion, pestilence, and the Great Fire. Less fortunately, in his final bid for literary fame, Jem falls into a fatal vat of boiling ink, but not before recounting the adventures in this rollicking novel's marvelous fabrication of a man and his times.
Synopsis
How does Jeremiah Mount, a dealer in pornography and a failed farmer's son, come to be the lover of the Duchess of Albemarle and the colleague of the great Samuel Pepys? This novel of jealousy and envy evokes the London of the Restoration as it brings its dubious hero to life.