Giddyap

Ampersand is a racehorse, the best in the world. Riding him, as English amateur jockey Harry Cotton discovers between the two world wars, is “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, shriveling to nothing the pleasures of love and wine.”

Cotton doesn’t ride Ampersand in a race. The horse’s obese, tyrannical owner, known by her initials, C.L., has wearied of her regular jockey and decided to give Cotton a chance at the Gold Cup, but just as quickly she changes her mind, yanking him out of the saddle after a steeplechase warmup.

He is left with that fleeting moment of perfection in an otherwise haphazard life.

Cotton goes on to other things. Before World War II, he follows a lover, a Jewish woman, to Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland), and witnesses the rise of anti-Semitism. During the war, he joins the special forces and participates in a successful raid against the Italians in North Africa, in which his closest army friend is killed. Invalided out of the service, he becomes a British government agent recruiting workers in neutral Ireland. He marries and has a son, Aldous, and is devastated by his wife’s untimely death.

Still, all this heavier material, which would rise to the top in the ordinary historical saga, sinks to the bottom in the first novel in Ferdinand Mount’s “A Chronicle of Modern Twilight” series. Mount, the editor of the Times (of London) Literary Supplement, writes in a comic vein that runs straight from Charles Dickens through Evelyn Waugh. Serious things aren’t ignored, but they are allowed to find their natural place--and gravity, in this case, works in laughter’s favor.

“The Man Who Rode Ampersand”--particularly the third-person part from Cotton’s point of view--consists of conversational riffs that imprint characters on our minds so vividly that further development or action proves unnecessary. They appear--C.L. and fellow jockey “Froggy” O’Neill and slimy bookie Cod Chamberlayne and rising politician Boy Kingsmill and whiskey-soaked philosopher Tom Dunbabin, whom the unhorsed Cotton meets while bartending at a Soho watering hole and brothel called the Pyjama Club--they speak, and we remember them, whether or not they return to speak again.

The banner of seriousness is upheld, somewhat shakily, in a first-person narrative by Aldous, whose sexual and bureaucratic misadventures are described in a later novel in the series, the Booker Prize nominee “Fairness.” Aldous is a clumsy, asthmatic boy who sees Cotton as “all exuberance and will.” He loves and resents his father and tries, with only partial success, to find something in the man he can respect.

Cotton, we know from the third-person narrative, is an intellectual lightweight. He never completes a proposed biography of an ancestor who helped Isaak Walton write “The Compleat Angler.” He drinks and gambles. Much of his undercover work in Ireland involves standing rounds in pubs. A small trust fund enables him to live without ever having a regular job. “He admired hard work and quiet, diligent people,” Aldous says. “He just did not fully understand what they were up to.” His biggest decision, to marry, seems to take no more thought than a wager on a horse.

Aldous makes much of his father’s combat experience. “It is too easy to imagine that the war came just in time to give meaning to the lives of a generation of misfits,” he says, but this seems precisely the argument he is making for Cotton. Cotton himself might demur. The North Africa raid is over and done with in a couple of pages, no more space than is devoted to one of Dunbabin’s drunken, hilarious monologues or to the ride on Ampersand.

The importance Cotton gives that ride--the chief anxiety of his old age is Froggy’s insinuation that he made the story up--is a sign of superficiality, to be sure. It’s related to his halfhearted pursuit of the Jewish lover, Stella, whom he leaves in Eastern Europe, and to his benign neglect of young Aldous. But if Cotton isn’t a particularly good man, neither is he a bad one. His life, in an age of heroes and monsters, is lived on a human scale. He likes people and has fun. That he did “once, just once” brush perfection is, Mount would have us believe, not inconsequential.