THE MAN WHO RODE AMPERSAND

A bona fide English eccentric takes center stage in the initial volume of TLS editor Mount’s novel cycle A Chronicle of Modern Twilight (Fairness, 2001, etc.).

The story of worldly Harry Cotton—a cross between Joyce Cary’s Gulley Jimson and George MacDonald Fraser’s Harry Flashman—is “reconstructed” in shifting past scenes imagined (and in some cases recalled) by his disapproving son Gus (Augustus). The picture that emerges is of a semi-dashing adventurer who comes to debatable maturity during the pre-WWII years, when he gains limited celebrity as the amateur jockey briefly entrusted with the valuable racehorse Ampersand, before tending bar at the moderately lurid Pyjama Club, romancing a feisty Fraülein in Hitler’s Germany, contracting tuberculosis during wartime and dallying at espionage as a procurer of Irish manpower for military materiel, eventually settling into a flamboyant old age that’s terminated cruelly when he suffers a stroke and ends up in a military hospital’s “Lazarus Ward.” Little of this is as entertaining or affecting as it might be, because the narrative moves at both a fragmented and a distractingly sedate pace, and the reader feels Mount setting up situations and introducing characters that and who, one suspects, figure more crucially in the cycle’s later volumes. The consequent slackness is partially redeemed by an eloquent prose style that smoothly accommodates both eye-catching figurative language (“silver stubble outlining his chin like the silhouette of a moonlit field of corn”) and thoughtful near-aphorisms (“it is too easy to imagine that the war came just in time to give meaning to the lives of a generation of misfits”). One senses throughout the heavy, virtually suffocating further influence of Evelyn Waugh’s autumnal Sword of Honour trilogy.

Too bad, because on the evidence of Fairness, at least, Mount’s Chronicle had been getting better as it went along.