Towards the end of Ferdinand Mount’s latest novel, The Pentecost Papers, a plutocrat talks of the English penchant for “children’s books and secret codes”. You wouldn’t think that Enid Blyton would be the catalyst for ecological terrorism, but Blyton was educated via the Friedrich Froebel method, which emphasized nature, and she was aware of our world’s fragility. In Mount’s novel, Blyton’s house, Green Hedges, is the inspiration for an organization that sabotages logging companies in the Amazon, just as Green Hedges was itself an idyllic mirage, concealing Blyton’s far from perfect home life.
Mount’s previous novels, including his A Chronicle of Modern Twilight sequence (1975-2004), satirized corporate mores and combined gentle melancholy with complex characterization. In The Pentecost Papers, he targets high finance and the ultra-rich, as well as vicious eco-warriors, using a narrative mode that combines the thriller, the children’s book and the comic novel.
Dickie Pentecost is the narrator, his surname anglicized from the Greek. Having led an unexceptional life as a diplomatic correspondent, and feeling untethered from the modern world, he meets Timbo Smith on a golf course (“the most pointless activity in the solar system”) and, despite the latter’s “miasma of menace”, is drawn to him by Timbo’s apparently supernatural healing abilities. The reader is never sure whether these should be taken at face value; in any case, like many elements in this novel, it is soon forgotten. Timbo repels most of the characters – Dickie’s wife calls him “feral” – yet Dickie enjoys his company and Timbo ends up as the novel’s hero.
Their friendship isn’t the first improbable thing in an equally improbable plot spanning decades and continents. Timbo lives in the shadow of heroism, in awe of his grandfather’s gallantry during the war, harking back to a time when evil could be more obviously identified. Fiercely loyal to his country, he nevertheless works for a shady organization named Ophion, after a gnostic sect (though this, too, has no bearing on the narrative). He is tasked with uncovering which bankers have been shorting the billionaire George Furcht’s logging business.
To help, Timbo enlists Luke, a professor who knows about cryptology, and his wife, Lee Thorold, nicknamed “Lethal”. When the reader first meets them, both are raving drunk and spitting hate about each other; soon, however, they are completely dry, back together and operating efficiently undercover.
Mount dispatches his characters all over the world, and there are many rollicking set pieces: the races in France; a trip to Brazil, which ends in imprisonment for Timbo; a traipse across the US in search of funds from a series of small-town banks. Closer to home, there is a charity fashion show; a visit to a Yorkshire stately home; and bewildering cameos from, among others, a fake Circassian princess.
Dickie, hardly being involved in the action himself, relies, in his first-person sections, almost entirely on other characters to explain things, which creates a sense of distance. There are third-person sections from the points of view of Timbo and Luke, but there is an overreliance on the kind of exposition within dialogue that has creative writing teachers itching to get out their red pens.
Though Dickie himself cannot remember whether it was Adam or Moses who saw the Burning Bush, intertextual references abound, not least to Blyton; there is also Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, Montaigne and Henry James, while Luke’s specialism is Kant. These references appear somewhat randomly. The answer, perhaps, lies in Luke, who doesn’t believe in “the Continuous Self”, but in an “Episodic Personality”; this applies equally well to the novel, which hangs loosely together, its constituent parts often seeming to hail from separate novels entirely.
This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem, but the plot relies on coincidence. While such a scheme might work in a children’s book, and the author may consciously be aping the genre’s conventions (his protagonists are a kind of grown-up Famous Five), this is hard on the adult reader. The Pentecost Papers comprises a rich, odd mixture that doesn’t quite come out right; yet Ferdinand Mount writes with lush intensity, as when Timbo escapes captivity in the rainforest, and the novel is dotted with witticisms and wry comments. Moreover, the ecologically conscious message is both necessary and vital. This, if nothing else, is what brings the episodes into a continuum: the idea that the world is vast, and we need to save it.
Philip Womack’s most recent novel is Ghostlord, 2023
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