Fair Lady Isn’t a Good Judge of Character, Especially Flawed Ones

The word “fairness” has several meanings. In fairy tales, it often means comeliness or beauty, as in “Mirror, Mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” It can also mean being light-skinned or blond-haired. But perhaps most important, “fairness” means qualities such as equity, justice, decency.

The etymological link between fairness as beauty and fairness as justice (a link that might have pleased Plato) seems rooted in an Old English word for evenness or regularity: a fair decision weighs both sides evenly, a fair face has even features.

In Ferdinand Mount’s novel of that title, “fairness” connotes all three things: beauty, blondness and equity. The narrator, an anemic fellow named Gus (short for Aldous) Cotton, even favors us with a brief history of the word culled from the lectures of his philosophy professor.

For Gus, fairness is embodied in a small, plain-spoken young woman whom he first meets when he and she have summer jobs as nannies to neighboring rich families. Helen Hardress is blond, good-looking, though hardly what one might call gorgeous, and has about her an unruffled air of common sense and decency.

Trouble is, Gus is not the only man who finds her very attractive. But as decades go by--the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s--he does seem to have the dubious distinction of being the only one of her admirers whom she doesn’t, at one point or another, find romantically appealing.

For Helen, although not promiscuous, is sadly lacking in discrimination and seems unable to see what is wrong with each subsequent new man in her life. Neither her training as a scientist nor her down-to-earth outlook on life seems to help. Only in time does she realize that the shady-looking foreign fellow actually is shady, that the wheeler-dealer billionaire is unscrupulous, or that the pathetic bore with whom she eventually ties the knot is a lamebrain. Such mismatches certainly do not seem “fair.”

Not only is Gus unable to figure out what makes Helen tick: The same holds true for Mount, who seems almost as clueless about his heroine’s psychology and motivation. Nor, for that matter, is it clear what makes Gus tick, even though he’s the narrator.

Gus’ friends are as odd a set as Helen’s lovers (and often turn out to be the same individuals): “How had I got tangled up with these awkward characters ...?” wonders Gus. “Did other people feel so ill at ease with what the outside world would have assumed to be their friends?” They are, indeed, rather like a collection of gargoyles: Jane, the lustful, rich American who (sort of) seduces a young Gus while he is looking after her children; Dodo Wilmot, the wealthy mover and shaker who takes Helen to hunt for emeralds in Africa; Dr. Maintenon-Smith, the shifty lung specialist who pretends to be a descendant of Louis XV’s mistress; and the oddly distasteful Moonman brothers: acrid, slippery, know-it-all Gerald, who edits a scandal-mongering satiric magazine, and dimwitted Bobs, who works in a travel agency and never met a cliche he didn’t like. Over the years, the same characters (many of whom are already familiar to British readers acquainted with Mount’s multi-novel sequence “Chronicle of Modern Twilight,” of which “Fairness” is part) keep popping up when and where Gus least expects them: It’s a small world after all, or rather, a very small deck of playing cards.

“Twilight” is perhaps the kindest term that could be applied to the world depicted in “Fairness.” Certainly it is, in the most negative sense, a small world and a diminished one, morally, spiritually and imaginatively: diminished in belief, in ideas, in passion, and in possibilities. Mount tries to extract a sort of grimly comic satire from this, but Evelyn Waugh he’s not. The characters not only have no psychological depth: They don’t even manage to resonate as types or archetypes. “Fairness” may reflect its author’s sense of postmodern malaise, but it doesn’t go beyond that. Insofar as Mount’s aim is satirical, his specific targets are not clearly drawn, nor is his attack sufficiently sharp. Insofar as his intentions are elegiac, his characters are so lacking in ideals, sensitivity, enthusiasm and talent that it is hard to mourn the loss of hopes and dreams they never really had in the first place.