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.
