Morality and mortality

At the start of this sixth and final volume of Ferdinand Mount’s novel sequence A Chronicle of Modern Twilight, the narrator Aldous (Gus) Cotton is about to take premature retirement from the Civil Service, having found, to his chagrin, that he has been passed over for the promotion that he thought to be his due. His raffish old comrade in asthma Joe Follows, a financier with a ‘colourful’ past — already met in the second volume, Of Love and Asthma — then persuades him to join in the flotation of a business called Heads You Win. This, at first dedicated merely to headhunting, soon extends to the hectic takeover of dicy concerns on either side of the Atlantic.

Having suffered a stroke, it is possible that Joe will not survive for long. Of the remaining two members of the gang, one, Keith Trull, is a former best-selling sci-novelist, just released from prison after a conviction for drug smuggling.