A plot description of "Accident" might make it seem like a conventional mystery/thriller novel, and yet it is not that at all. It's not a thriller (though it is a sort of moral and metaphysical mystery) and it is certainly not conventional. Mosley's use of language is innovative without being obscure -- he uses the rhythms of his words, sentences, and sentence fragments both to create suspense and to force the reader to pay as much attention to what is not being said and thought as what is (it's no surprise that the book was made into a film with a script by Harold Pinter).

"Accident" begins with a car accident. The narrator of the book, who we soon discover is a professor of philosophy at Oxford, lives near the accident site and is the first person on the scene. He discovers in the car a half-conscious woman and a dead man, both of whom are students of his. He carries the woman to his house, then calls the police. But he doesn't tell them about the woman.

The book moves backwards in time from there, and we get to know who these characters are and their tangled relationships to each other. At the end, we return to the accident, now fully understanding all of the forces playing into the situation.

The book is not quite 200 pages long, and yet its texture is so rich, its moral and philosophical questions so difficult, its language so perfect that it lives in the reader's (or, at least, this reader's) mind as books of twice its length do not.

Here is a book that will please anyone looking for an extraordinary biography. I would also advise you to buy this book before it goes out of print. Nearly anything ever written about Mosley eventually gets sold out because there is usually a lot more interest in him than publishers forecast.

Many Americans know that Mosley was the most prominent British fascist leader prior to the Second World War, but few know that prior to that he was the member of parliament who was given the task of constructing an economic plan capable of getting Britain out of the Great Depression.

Although many leading socialists of the day supported his ideas, including his personal friend in America, Franklin Roosevelt, the British government was not bold enough to act, adopting the attitude of just muddling through.

That's why Mosley started up his fascist movement. The death of Mosley's first wife contributed to his determination to implement his ideas, and the private correspondence published in this book explains why for the first time.

After World War 2, Mosley's view was that the nationalisms of Europe were obsolete, and that the European economic cooperation of the EEC was the first wave of a better future. He also forecasted that within the United States the European population would find a similar reorganizing just as necessary.

How very difficult it must have been for a respected and successful establishment liberal to provide a balanced assessment of his own father, the founder of British Fascism, but Nicolas Mosley accomplishes this feat superbly. Fascism is obsolete of course, but there had to have been some wonderful quality in Oswald Mosley's own character as well, because shortly before his death he turned over all his personal papers - not to more conservative members of the family - but to Nicholas, his ideological opposition. Read this one for sure, for these are the revelations of a family tormented - yet never completely divided - by the world conflict which pulled at their souls.

In 1991, Nicholas Mosley resigned from the judging panel for England's prestigious Booker Prize when none of his choices made the shortlist. Writing about the affair in The Times of London, Mosley related that all of his choices were rejected because they were 'novels of ideas, or novels in which characters were subservient to ideas.' He went on to opine, in a statement that seems to apply as much to his Whitbread Prize-winning novel 'Hopeful Monsters' as to his view of his Booker choices: 'My point was that humans were beings who did have ideas, who were often influenced by ideas, to whom ideas were important. If they were not, then there was some lack in being human.'

'Hopeful Monsters' is a novel where character development is subservient to ideas, where narrative action takes place against big historical events. While it ostensibly tells the story of a life-long romantic relationship between Max Ackerman, an English physicist, and Eleanor Anders, a German-Jewish anthropologist, the romance is as much a vehicle for the promulgation and exploration of ideas as it is a tale of a man and a woman in the twentieth century.

'Hopeful Monsters' begins at the end of World War I. Max is ten years old and lives outside Cambridge, England. His father is a biologist who specializes in genetic inheritance and his mother is a woman of seeming artistic interests who had been 'brought up on the fringes of what was even then known as the Bloomsbury Group.' His parents have had long ties to the Cambridge University community. Eleanor, too, lives in an intellectual milieu, one in which ideas predominate. Eleanor lives in Berlin, where her mother is a Marxist and follower of Rosa Luxemburg and her father is a lecturer in philosophy. From such beginnings, novels of ideas are made!

From this starting point, 'Hopeful Monsters' narrates the story of Max and Eleanor through the rise of Nazism in Germany, the post-Lenin rise to power of Joseph Stalin, the Spanish Civil War, and the development of the Atomic Bomb. It does this while, all the time, interweaving Darwinism (and its Lamarckian heresy), Marxism, quantum physics and the uncertainty principle, Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypes, and even suggestions of Jewish mysticism. It is a story that runs from 1918 until the 1970s and continually challenges the reader to think about the ideas, the opinions, the intellectual sensibilities and feelings of Max, Eleanor and the books other characters. It is a magnificent and challenging novel of ideas, a novel that deservedly won the Whitbread Prize in 1990.

If 'Hopeful Monsters' has any shortcomings, it is that ideas and historical events predominate at the expense of character development. It also suffers, at times, from a somewhat turgid prose style. In particular, Mosley is fond of introducing statements by Eleanor and Max with the clauses 'I said' and 'You said'. It is a construction that helps the reader follow long spoken exchanges, but gets a bit tedious. Mosley also tends to write sentences as statements with a question mark at the end. This, too, can be annoying, suggesting a rising inflection by the speaker that can hardly be the intent. These are, however, relatively minor failings in a novel which is majestic in the breadth and depth of its intellectual suggestiveness, a really big modern novel that deserves to be more widely read.

Interplay of biology, physics, philosophy and politics. Going beyond the usual banal comparisons, the author presents the period between the world wars as a political and human investigation into uncertainty, quantum mechanics and relativity. Following 2 young people, a British boy and a German girl, the book proceeds in a series of backlooking narratives that take place in the major cockpits of the 20th century - from Berlin in the 20's to Russia and Spain in the 30's; politics plays a strong part, with Fascism and Communism playing for dominance across the continent. Through all this the characters try to find a way to create a meaningful life. Significant characters whose views permeate the book include the Lamarckian scientists Kammerer and Lysenko, Wittgenstein, Heideigger, Einstein, and many others. Never does the book bog down in didactic presentation, while still presenting a clear understanding of the major intellectual trends of the 20th century. Many other books have used this period as a background, but in this case, it's an essential element to the plot.

Great for book club discussions - you'll find no end of ways to interpret and discuss this book.

This book was recommended to me a decade ago and I loved it then, have reread it several times and will always be moved by it.Complex, challenging and always idiosyncratic while adhering to the grand tradition of the novel of ideas it has passages so dense and stimulating you want to memorize them or read it out aloud to whoever is listening. It tells the story of two idealistic individuals who are caught up in some of the crazier movements of the 20th century and manage what is so hard to do; to adventure from each other's safety and still stay true to the idea of each other. Despite the depth of the political analysis and the complexity of the portrayed philosophies I have always thought of it as primarily a love story that is both starcrossed and redeemed. By the time the author imagines them at rest as "one of these everlastingly happy couples on an Etruskan tomb" and the cancer( of fanaticism? of loneliness?) is dying it never fails to make me happy when I'm sad or sad when I'm happy.
It reminds me of Niels Bohr who said that you recognize a profound truth by its opposite also being a profound truth.
You guessed it: highly recommended

Mosely writes in the end of Impossible Object, "But you always read books more for form than for content," giving away, I believe, an epiphany that mostly comes to those who have read many, many books. Mosely's form in Impossible Object is extremely interesting because of how intertwined the stories are--characters reappear, images recur, and narrators are constantly positing on what exactly constitutes love. When you're finished reading the book you could very well wonder if it is really a short story collection or a loosely-stitched novel. You can decide. Whatever it is, I really enjoyed the book and think that Mosley is a fine writer who deserves a larger audience. Sometimes the characters are a bit on the undercharacterized side--making them a little vague and mildly uninteresting--but Mosley's prose makes up for that easily. The first line of his short story, "Life After Death" is a good example of the unique vision Mosley captures in his text, "Walking through streets late at night I saw a crack in the sky and a red arm coming through with the fist clenched like a foetus." It's pretty hard to walk away from a line like that--not exactly your usual sunrise. Very refreshing.

I was left with a sense of confusion after reading this book. There is so much interpretation that needs to be done after reading this, that a reader needs to back and re-read many times. A handful of stories were very interesting, and the rest, well, I can't comment on them because I didn't fully understand the book. Anyone who is up for a challenge,and good at interpretation of books on many levels, would enjoy this, and those who undersand it..e-mail me and tell me what you thought it was about.

A screenwriter (Jason) boards a plane bound for Tel Aviv to convince a Hollywood producer (Epstien) that his new screenplay on Masada can never be made into a film. In the back of the plane, the screenwriter's wife (Lilia) and child meet up with a very unpredictable man. On the ground, a psychology major turned Masada security guard, and his wife, a physics student turned airport security official, do battle with strange interlopers known only as "protesters."

This book is a good example of experimental fiction. Mosley creates multiple layers of spoken dialog and he successfully incorporates archetypes and the unconscious into articulated thoughts and events. What I liked best about it was the unexpectedness of the writing combined with a truly thrilling storyline.

The chapters where we must plow through existential conversation between characters from Jason's screenplay are somewhat tedious compared to the present-day action on the plane. They remind us too heavily of the pedantic goals of the book: a discussion of whether it is better to sacrifice oneself for society or to survive; whether life is a "going concern" or a "calamity," and whether we are all really actors who can't tell anymore when we're acting.

Readers who are newcomers to Western philosophy will want to follow up with readings on Plato, Josephus, and Masada. Those more experienced with the historical contexts for the book will no doubt question, argue, and go read the other four books in the Catastrophe Practice series.

"Peter Salmon said" By: Peter Salmon

Peter Salmon said, "In Edward Hower's article 'Reviewing books', he explains how he doesn't trash books in his reviews, saying 'Not I. If I can't find at least something to like in a book's first twenty or thirty pages, I send it right back, so another reviewer can try it' (p.26). Unfortunately for me, and any other poor sap who bought Nicholas Mosley's Assassins, we can't just send the book back to the publisher. We bought it for the cover price of $12.95, and say to ourselves, 'Hey...they should've given me $12.95 just for reading the first chapter.' "

Peter Salmon said, "On the book's very first page, a title is given for all the comments from big-time books reviewers, 'Praise for Assassins'. Here they describe this book, 'thoroughly imagined', 'an adroitly organized political thriller', and 'a cocoon of dismay and terror'. It is not these descriptions that I disagree with. In fact the thrilling plot is what counteracts Mosley's childish style. Set in England during the mid-sixties, the daughter of Sir Simon Mann, England's Foreign Secretary, stumbles upon a young assassin. The assassin takes Mann's daughter, who interrupts his deadly plans, and locks her in an abandoned cottage away from her home. When let loose to be part of a grander plot, she hides her fateful knowledge, unaware of everyone's outcome."

Peter Salmon said, "Maybe you are wondering why each paragraph begins with 'Peter Salmon said'. It is my way of satirizing Mosley's monotonous and childlike style. What makes me want to pull my hair out is the fact that every quotation is begun with the word 'said'. I found three instances (and yes I did count) when he did not use 'said'. Along with this, for many characters, he did not give names. He simply regarded them as 'the man with...'. When these two styles are put together on the same page, it is twice as annoying than having just one."

Peter Salmon said, "If you think you may be interested in this book, I beg you to go to a bookstore and read page 52. If you can tolerate Mosley's style for that one page, then you are certainly one of a kind."