Ferdinand Mount is a curiosity among novelists—a writer so apparently anachronistic and traditional in manner that it amounts almost to eccentricity. To say that nobody else in England writes novels remotely resembling his is not necessarily to make a point about his originality; there used to be a great number of writers mining a similar vein. Mount is the most alarmingly English of novelists, and his manner is unmistakably English in every sentence. A very amusing play by Michael Frayn, Clouds, begins with a conversation between two English people, each of whom thinks that the other is a foreigner; the sentence that makes everything clear is "We have a certain dogged persistence that seems to go down quite well in some quarters." Mount's style announces his nationality in the same way; he is, in the old joke, as English as God.
The fictional accent is instantly identifiable as the product of a specific national school and, within that national school, of a particular social group. It is both exacting in its portrayal of physical properties and elegantly, Latinately abstract in its account of human motivations. On the exacting side:
Luncheon in village hall: cold ham and corned beef, green salad and pickles, apple tart and custard, two sittings, please be punctual, bring your own knife, fork and spoon. I went to the children's afternoon tea: buttered, or rather margarined, buns, jelly, a few, not very many, cakes with the ineradicable taste of powdered egg.
On the abstract:
If that was indeed the intention, it had the reverse effect because, far from bathing Cod in a eupeptic glow, this assumed geniality merely threw into higher relief the acerbic acuity which he displayed in his business dealings.
The fascination with specific inanimate properties and the Olympian summary of behavior through abstraction have, in the end, much the same effect—of restraint, of distancing the narrator from the rough-and-tumble of human passions. That is not to say that there is no passion here; indeed, the most characteristically English passages deal with a certain sort of physical ecstasy, conveyed in the halting, fumbling rhythms of English speech.
Once, just once, perfection. Like sitting in an armchair, the trainer said. That, yes, but much more, almost as if sitting in an armchair was the best sensation the human body could ever know, shrivelling to nothing the pleasures of love and wine; as if his whole life he had been bumping up and down on camels and switchback railways and pogo-sticks and motor-boats in a high sea, his vertebrae all jangled together.
It is worth saying that an English novelist of this stamp would never write about sex in such a manner. Mount is writing about riding a horse. But the intense Englishness of Mount's fiction is evident above all in an extraordinarily refined representation of social class. Vulgarity, social position, correct behavior, are everything here; a reader uninterested in fine distinctions of this sort will find The Man Who Rode Ampersand (first published in Britain in 1975) as baffling as Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji, and even in England the narrative may now need some amplification.