Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Volume Three in Mount's Chronicle of Modern Twilight., 11 Sep 2003
Ferdinand Mount is an elegant, controlled, and immensely intelligent writer, who never fails to offer some interesting morsels to chew on. In Fairness, the third novel in Mount's Chronicle of Modern Twilight, he features the same characters as in the two previous books. Gus Cotton, the narrator, is a young man who, at the outset of this book, becomes friends with golden-haired Helen, like him working as a nanny/tutor one summer in Normandy. Gus and Helen, their employers, the children and friends of the employers, and even the bookies and racetrack touts from the earlier novels in the series appear and reappear, sometimes in extraordinary coincidences, over the twenty year time span of this novel.Unfortunately, Gus himself is a cipher in this novel, too phlegmatic to inspire much sympathy, and not strong enough to hold the myriad characters and long plot line together. Helen is described as aspiring "to a morally satisfying life," yet throughout the book she constantly makes self-interested and surprising compromises, and falls into bed with just about everyone. There are few occasions in which we see Helen wrestling with moral decisions--she simply acts, impulsively. A government-sanctioned stripping of mineral resources from a Central African country, a miners' strike, and a child abuse investigation feature in the plot and involve both Gus and Helen, though the significance of these events in 20th century British history is not really clear. Fairness may be an important part of Mount's large scale Chronicle of Modern Twilight. It may develop themes and social commentary significant to the overall success of the Chronicle. As a separate novel, however, it lacked coherence, despite its sometimes wonderful and thought-provoking scenes. Mary Whipple
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1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the moon also sets/beatrice the bitch, 28 Aug 2001
By A Customer
Ferdinand Mount has been called the successor to Evelyn Waugh, but one can see his Gus suffers from Hemingway's narrator's disease...or perhaps his body knows more than his mind when it comes to coupling with Helen, his flaxen-haired "serious" object of desire. Like Fitzgerald's narrator in the Great Gatsby, Gus stands on the sidelines. Like Hemingway's narrator in The Sun Also Rises, he watches his love engage in a number of inappropriate encounters and love matches. Helen represents the spirit of - the 60s? 70s? 80s? youth and life? in England - to Gus; she is his waifish Beatrice. And he is in hell. Eight chapters and a brief ironic coda show that - even in the last couplet of the novel - Helen never gets it, and that of course means Gus never gets any. She is in turn nanny, chemist, mining geologist, wife and mistress....and thru the trick of "ancient mummery" a member of the House of Lords. Gus watches her set herself up with a succession of overinflated comedic figures including a Shavian industrialist--and his two russet women, a feckless travel agent, a satiric editor, and a Whitehall official with a CB -- the latter Gus's boss. Gus watches - hopelessly. Gus draws first blood, sexually, in an encounter with his own employer while he's nanny(goat)ing alongside Beatr-- Helen. Later in a pleasant side trip to Tidewater Virginia Gus discovers that sex isn't so complicated if one just goes straightforward. Is this the face that launched a thousand ships? Are these the lips that beguiled two-thousand eyes? How has she found this earthenware disguise? Is this the woman? the enchantress? the witch?
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