He wrote about everything – sex, the Church, domestic violence and the Troubles – from an angle. His novel The Pornographer is in fact more about familial duty and the conflict between town and countryside than it is about the sexually explicit stories his protagonist creates. His letters give a sense of a man ferociously interested in creating work. Aside from the pleasant exchanges he has with fellow writers – including Seamus Heaney and Colm Tóibín – and the occasional broadsides he issues, especially when he thinks a publisher might be about to land a stereotypically Irish cover on one of his books, he keeps his emotions in check. If we are truthful, we might say that the collection doesn’t make for fantastically racy reading. But it does provide a wonderfully consonant picture of the man and his novels.
OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH
Spad cad FRANCES WILSON Making Nice By Ferdinand Mount Bloomsbury £16.99 How does he do it? It wasn’t a year ago that I was reviewing Kiss Myself Goodbye, Ferdinand Mount’s glorious account of his amoral Aunt Munca, whose every word, as the novelist Mary McCarthy said of playwright Lillian Hellman, was a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ Now this novel lands on the doorstep and it’s another peach. Making Nice is a satire on spads and dukes of dark corners like Dominic Cummings, but Mount’s aunt and his latest villain, Ethelbert Evers, have so much in common that they might be two versions of the same person. Munca, who took her own fond
nickname from Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Two Bad Mice, was otherwise known as Eileen Constance Sylvia McDuff, Patricia Elizabeth Baring, and Mrs Greig Mount. Ethelbert, who models himself on the Pied Piper, calls himself Ethel while his real name, he admits, is Johnny although it is actually Ethelbert. Munca invented her posh parentage, passed off her son as her brother, disguised her sister as her friend, and had several husbands at the same time. Ethel invents his heroic parentage, passes off his mistress as his business partner and is engaged to two women at the same time. Like Munca, Ethel makes fools of everyone. He is also, however, a magician of sorts who often appears out of nowhere pulling rabbits out of hats. He knows where you live, knows what you earn, knows your daughter’s phone number, knows you’ve lost your job and knows what you’re thinking before you’ve even thought it. The events are narrated by Dickie Pentecost in quick, light, deadpan prose, which lands perfectly where it falls. A middle-aged diplomatic correspondent who sees himself as a ‘low-key character,’ Dickie first meets Ethel in the queue for the toilet on a Welsh campsite. ‘Not D K Pentecost?’ says Ethel. ‘I read all your stuff… Originally Pentecostas, am I right? Left Smyrna in 1922 – not you, of course, obviously, but your dad perhaps?’ And just like that, Dickie becomes Ethel’s creature. Dickie, his wife and his teenage daughters are ‘champing’, which is what you call camping in a disused church. Champing is one of the many new terms to be found in Making Nice. Another is ‘making nice’ itself, which means being nice to someone you do not harbour nice feelings towards. Ethel’s company is called Making Nice, and making nice is, he explains in his Ethel-speak, all about
‘Hold up, lads – we’ve got a problem. They’ve installed one of those security-camera doorbells’
‘the bottom line. You make nice, you make moolah, lots more moolah … we’re engineering a paradigm shift, the ambition is to transform the System into a game you can’t help falling in love with.’ His real ambition, Ethel later reveals, is to become a ‘human people-carrier’ like his much-maligned hero, the child-abductor of Hamelin. Before long, Dickie is working in the Reputation Management arm of Making Nice, even though he has no idea what his job entails or how he ended up there. It all seems a bit dodgy ‘but, to be honest, it was the dodginess that caught my fancy’. Soon he is being sent on dodgy missions to Africa and America in order to burnish the reputation of dodgy politicians. Meanwhile, Dickie’s 16-yearold ballet-dancing daughter is also doing dodgy stuff with Ethel, who looks set to become Dickie’s son-in-law. The plot, both crazily implausible and totally believable, rattles along like one of those Looney Tunes cartoons in which Wile E Coyote (the E, as I’m sure Ethel knows, also stands for Ethelbert) tries to catch and eat the Road Runner. Ethel makes a terrific political operator, but the most entertaining character is Dickie himself. Spineless and easily corrupted, Dickie is even more dangerous than Ethel because he does not believe in anything. Instead of being, like Ethel, one step ahead, Dickie is one step outside his own story. This is how Dickie describes his wife: ‘She is handsome, Jane. I love the way she looks, with such a classical profile, that alabaster skin and those grey-blue eyes – rather how I imagine the goddess Athena looking. But there is something severe about her, I can’t deny it. She is not the first person I would choose to tell me that from now on it’s palliative care only.’ Dickie knows both everything and nothing about himself, which is what makes him such a good narrator. He knows, for example, that you can’t ‘believe a word Ethel says’ but doesn’t know that he, Dickie, is equally duplicitous. He also sees everything and nothing. He fails to see that his daughter is pregnant by Ethel. But he notices that when Ethel tells his life story at the Nunthorpe Travelodge, his ‘grey eyes were really shining bright, for the first time since I had met him, with that intense warmth which some people display only when they’re talking about themselves’. Making Nice is the funniest, shrewdest, most elegant novel I have read in years. What will Ferdinand Mount conjure up next? The Oldie October 2021 59
