![]() Unlike Frédéric Moreau in Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale (to which this book owes no meagre debt), Piet is magnificently gifted, not only "extremely attractive to most women and to many men", but also a fine pianist, draughtsman and lover. ![]() Piet Barol, the titular pleasure seeker, is a priapic, ambitious young man come to seek his fortune in belle époque Amsterdam. It was always clear that he knew how to write a beautiful sentence, but one feared that Mason's literary legacy might be defined by the numbers on his advance cheque rather than the letters on his pages. His latest feels like a make-or-break moment. ![]() While The Drowning People – written when Mason was just 18 – has a dedicated following, subsequent novels failed to wow. R obert McCrum, in a 2002 article in this newspaper, used the vast advance paid to Richard Mason for his first two books – The Drowning People and Us – as a stick with which to chastise the profligate publishing industry. ![]()
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