Nicholas Mosley: Writing Life Homepage

    In the Apocrypha there is a story of a beautiful young widow, Judith, who saves her besieged town by offering herself to the Assyrian captain Holofernes, and then, before he can make love to her, cuts off his head.  Judith is the third of Mosley's sparkling philosophical novels on the characters introduced in Catastrophe Practice. It opens with Judith, here a young actress, taking part in a West End play on that same old apocryphal story of woman's control and betrayal. But in the course of the play, she performs a small unscripted act of assistance to the Holofernes character, part of whom has popped out of his codpiece, and this, together with some other malapropisms which have gone before, jogs the entire performance into a different frame: the actors now read their lines in a detached, self-reflective style, commenting, as it were, on the ridiculousness of the passion and drama they are portraying. Thus Mosley refers back to one of the central topics of Catastrophe Practice and Serpent: the differences between acting and not-acting, and his view that some style of divided, reflexive consciousness is both more true-to-life and wholesome.

    With the self-aware Judith - who is determined not to hide from the problem of female control - Mosley is able to explore the more subtle and positive modes of feminine power. In three long letters Judith recounts her descent in London to "rock bottom" - a result of her experiments with sex, drugs, and power - her surfacing during a stay at an ashram in India, and her discovery, back in England sometime later, of her place in the extended family and the encompassing aesthetic network. Her goal is connection and to free herself of the constraints of a narrow, personal viewpoint; consequently she is an agent and a symbel of growth toward harmony, egoless receptivity, and grace - at best a vehicle for truth.

    Mosley's rejection of linear narrative has brought him, over a career of thirty years, to a tight, allusive style which continually fractures and reorders patterns of ideas and relations. This is not refined idiosyncrasy; it is the implementation of a code to demonstrate and activate our apprehension of patterns in a world of epistemological and moral paradoxes. Adapting to this complex order, the natural order, depends upon our being open to a network of connections which are indirect and reflexive and, importantly, our being able to communicate about them and foster them. His style is capable of capturing the tangles of ordinary speech and communication; evidently he has listened, but also his literary imagination has been informed by ongoing philosophical inquiry. The course of Judith's journey crosses interwoven patterns of death and rebirth and of good coming from evil; she is encouraged by the insights of Kleist, a guru who may be Bhagwan Sri Rajneesh, and by other contemporaries, partly fictive, who are researching the phenomena of indirect and unintended effects, in biology, the behavioral sciences, and art. (In fact, Mosley did visit the ashram in India, and his account of Judith's ashram, called the Garden and ministered by God and Lilith, is a tour de force, and appropriately non-serious.)

    The conceptual elements of Mosley's work may seem to be too disparate; however, one of his great achievements, as a philosopher and a writer, is his ability to detect hidden connections and to focus upon the most elusive phenomena. His forte is the indirect approach - around the back way - to aspects of experience which, like light itself, cannot be examined directly. Judith is his examination of the indirectness of the path to grace.
                                                                                                                                                                       John Banks

This review appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1991, Vol. XI, No.1, p. 309..
Nicholas Mosley, Hopeful Monsters. Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., London, 1990, 551 pages.

       The last volume of Mosley’s Catastrophe Practice series of novels and plays, Hopeful Monsters focuses on Eleanor and Max, who have been the elder mentors, inspirations, to the five other protagonists. The narrative scaffolding is quite conventional, moving back and forth between young Eleanor in 1920's Berlin and Max in England, then tracing, through their letters to one another, their separate but complimentary emotional and intellectual explorations. Eleanor trains in anthropology and does a stint in Africa; Max is interested in biology and physics and goes to Russia. Both eventually become entangled in the Spanish Civil War, Eleanor finally rescuing Max, then having to extricate herself, a Jew, from Nazi Germany: indeed, the bulk of the novel concerns their escapes from predicaments, political and conceptual, and their hard lessons in the value of faith and ironic detachment. survival always being a consequence of indirect effects. Later Max works on the Bomb, for peace of course, and Eleanor tries to devise an anthopology that might recognize its effect on what it observes! Their story is colourful, suspenseful, intricate. but the main structure of the novel is comprised of ideas.

       Hopeful Monsters is a philosophical jungle, hell for some but paradise for those with the right gear, or curiousity.Young Eleanor, whose father is a philosopher and whose mother is a Jewish activist, is placed in Einstein's environment, and is interested in the impact of abstract ideas, or fantasy, on reality, and in the relativities of political power and victimization. Young Max is fascinated by Kammerer's experiments on the inheritance of acquired characteristics and does his own experiment on salamanders. This is the biological dimension of the Catastrophe Practice theme and the origin of the technical title: how do mutations, hopeful monsters, manage to fashion for themselves a niche which does not yet exist?

       The meeting of Eleanor's and Max's ideas is also elegant: how might we - sometimes destructive monsters - fashion a moral, mental, aesthetic environment in which we can survive? Mosley has no pat answer, but he takes Eleanor and Max along a likely path, past Nietzsche, Kleist, Marx, Husserl, Bohr, Jung, Bateson. . . which is not a random sampling from great minds but a search for effective conceptual strategies As life itself depends upon codes, our liveliness of mind - and in the end our physical survival, escaping an evolutionary dead-end - might depend upon our learning a style of self-management, of consciousness.

       There is another level of philosophical engagement in Mosley’s style. His most abstract concern is pattern itself, manifested publicly in codes, social conventions, art, myth, personal style, and privately, most intimately, in our grasp of the complexities and ambiguities of inner life.  His allusive, reflexive language is intended to model, sometimes generate, the subtle processes of self-consciousness, thereby forcing recognition of our freedom to bring new patterns to bear upon experience. This is an exploration of the positive implications of Wittgenstien's conclusions on the limitations of language, employing the full power of living language to approach the impossibilities of life, the dimension which cannot be quite described but which might be sprung from the page, as it were, between writer and reader. This is the monster's realm, where we might learn to feel at home.

       Although recognizably human - flesh and blood and feeling - Mosley's characters are also ciphers, which, like notes of music, gestures of dance, and words of reportage, are at once obiects, experiences, signs and symbols.  At the end, when Max may be dying, he looks at the child and asks what is immortal. I think Mosley's answer would not be proteins and genes but something supervenient, on the order of pattern, style, spirit.
                                                                                                                                                                   John Banks

This review appeared in The Review of Contemporary Fiction Summer 1997, Vol. XVII, No.2., p. 270.
 Nicholas Mosley, Children of Darkness and Light, Secker & Warburg 1996. 241 pages.

       At 241 pages Children of Darkness and Light is an easier read than Mosley's imposing 1990 Whitbread Prize winner Hopeful Monsters; however like almost all of Mosley's work it poses serious problems philosophical. Lacking the narrative baggage of Monsters, its style is a bit more abstract, darting, witty - strongly reminiscent of his earlier Imago Bird and Serpent.  Harry, a canny middle-aged journalist - an easily recognizable semblance of earlier protagonists, or the author - is curious about the children in the former Yugoslavia and in Cumbria, England who were said to have had visions of the Virgin Mary. In the background there are his marriage in difficulty, his son on the brink of adolescence, Harry's still insistent sexual monkey, and our real world of atrocities and nihilism; Harry wants to know how to care for them all:

So I went and wrote a piece about the wonderment of the children on the side of the hill; the ruthlessness of church and state authorities in their treatment of the children. I mangaged to make the harassment of the children seem vaguely sexual.

       The behaviour of these knowing children seems mysterious: they appear here or there unexpectedly, as though they were visiting from some other level of reality (as, of course, they are). Mosley's journalist enters a story which is also a kind of experiment; like anyone, he is both actor and observer at the same time, necessarily part of the event he reports. We are perpetually at the horizon of an unformed world and undecided events; what, then, is the effect of our knowing that it is our own brains which configure our world?  The model for Harry's search is in those experiments on the puzzling behaviour of light quanta, in which scientists are in effect trying to see their means of seeing and thinking.  Mosley has not overdone the science - this is not pop philosophy exploiting "quantum mysteries" - but the paradoxes of quantum physics are the theoretical scaffolding behind Harry's respect and tolerance for the mysteries he encounters. There are more than literary grounds for likening children to particles of light, and, to honour what is obviously Mosley's hope, the recognition of this might indeed help spark some veneration for their unknown potentialities. For humans, he asks, might there not be some responsibility to behave like gods?

       Clearly Mosley demands much of his readers, and Children is not for those who would prefer to keep their reality unconvoluted, to believe, perhaps, that Harry's eventual encounter with the Virgin Mary either is or is not genuine. The atmosphere is right: we are suspended in an experiment in progress.
                                                                                                                                                                     John Banks

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