A run of the mill bloke

Piet Barol is young man contentedly conscious of the fact that he is ‘extremely attractive to most women and to many men’. Lucky Piet. His good looks do him no harm when he arrives in Amsterdam in 1907 to be interviewed for the position of tutor to a rich hotelier’s son. The job is his after a little flirtation with the lady of the house, and throughout the rest of the novel Piet sets to work on using his new position as a first step towards the life of luxury he feels (as most good-looking young people do) is his natural right. One of the other things he has to set to work on is his employer’s wife, who holds him to the promises of his initial sauciness. But Piet likes an older woman, so that’s alright.

Piet moves seamlessly between the social spheres above and below stairs. He makes friends with his fellow servants and is taken to heart, almost as a son, by his master. I wouldn’t, of course, wish to suggest that the ease with which Piet appears at home in both kitchen and ballroom is due to a childhood so perfectly suited to such adventures (his father was a Dutch clerk and his mother a Parisian opera singer determined to teach him the ways of the fashionable world just in case he ever found himself there) that only a novelist could have contrived it.

We readers should be grateful for Piet’s good fortune, because we travel with him on his passport to hedonism, and glimpse with him the golden world of the belle époque. Mason manages to evoke this blessed land with a happy ease by sprinkling his prose with short catalogues of the delicacies enjoyed by its inhabitants. And by having us enter that world with Piet, a fellow newcomer, Mason is able to give us a guided tour of it without making his novel feel like a well researched text-book.

Whilst atmosphere is a strength of Richard Mason’s novel, narrative is a weakness. Mason more than once sets up incidents of great dramatic tension (Piet rashly pretends he can ride a horse and ends up on the back of an unmanageable brute, and later has his philandering publicly exposed) but seems to shy away from letting conflicts play themselves out. As a result, what should be catalytic incidents, forcing the story on, fizzle out – and events are left feeling arbitrary. There is little sense of narrative necessity and moments one assumes are intended to be emotional high points lack power (Piet’s employer’s response to revelations about his wife is particularly unconvincing).

Piet is a well drawn character, but not utterly fascinating. Despite the racy title Piet is no wild hedonist and these are not thrilling confessions. On my count, he has sex with two women (one of them once), gets drunk once, is disgusted at the thought of using a prostitute, masturbates occasionally, and has some nice dinners. More like a reasonable few weeks for an average student than a reckless epicure. In truth, Piet as a character falls somewhere between Shakespeare’s Iago and Byron’s Don Juan (come to think of it, who doesn’t?). He’s too nice to be compellingly Machiavellian, and too worldly to be winningly naïve. He seems like a moderately ambitious (but conscientious) young man to whom a number of quite interesting things happen. 

Concluding with the ominous promise TO BE CONTINUED, History of a Pleasure Seeker seems meant as an introduction to a character destined to enjoy many adventures. Piet, however, will need to become a bit surer of who he is if he’s going to be more Flashman than a flash in the pan.