As a novelist, biographer, editor, and screenwriter, Nicholas Mosley has always been concerned with the central paradox of writing: if by definition fiction is untrue, and biography never complete, is there a form that will enable a writer to get at the truth of a life? In Efforts at Truth Mosley scrutinizes his own life and work, but examines them as a curious observer, fascinated by the constant interaction of reality and the written word. As a life, it has been colorful, in settings ranging from the West Indies to a remote Welsh hill farm, from war action in Italy to battles with Hollywood moguls, from the Colony Room to the House of Lords. In print, the range has been as wide: editor of a controversial religious magazine, author of the acclaimed novel series Catastrophe Practice, screenwriter of his own work with Joe Losey and John Frankenheimer, biographer of his notorious father Oswald Mosley, and in 1990, winner of the Whitbread Award for his novel Hopeful Monsters.
In a series of inter-related stories, husbands, wives and lovers attempt to come to grips with their 'impossible' situations, while the novel itself attempts to show in its formal inventiveness just how bewildering romantic love can be.
Natalie Natalia"?is Nicholas Mosley's brilliant examination of political life. It revolves around Anthony Greville, a conservative Member of Parliament who is tormented by his ambivalence toward his career, by his religious doubts, and by his adulterous affair with Natalia Jones, the enigmatic wife of a colleague. The course of their affair dramatizes love in its most creative and perilously destructive aspects, the two facets symbolized in the two names he has for his lover: "I sometimes called Natalia Natalie instead of Natalia," Greville says, "when she was the ravenous rather than the angelic angel... What Natalie said was often a code for what Natalia was meaning." Ranging in setting from England to Central Africa, the novel is a remarkable investigation of ethics, with fiction itself as an ethical activity.
A journalist investigates the appearance of the Virgin Mary to a group of children in England. The site is near a nuclear power station which had an accident. He remembers children having a similar vision during a nuclear accident in Yugoslavia. Is there a connection?
Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because they feel they know what they have to do, whereas in peace they have to discover this. But what should inform them--custom? need? duty? ambition? desire? Forces pull in different directions--fidelity versus adventurousness, probity versus fun. During the war, Mosley found himself having to combine fondness for his father, Oswald Mosley, with the need to speak out against his post-war politics. In times of peace, his love for his wife and children, too, seemed riddled with paradoxes. He sought answers in Christianity, but came to see organized religion as primarily a social institution. How does caring not become a trap?
Including pieces on Gregory Bateson, William Faulkner, Philip Pullman, Sir Oswald Mosley's politics, religion and stammering, this diverse collection gathers essays written by Nicholas Mosley over the past forty years. Resembling the behaviour of slime mould - a strange organism made up of separate amoebae that temporarily form a single pillar which then bursts in order to scatter its seeds across the forest floor - the ideas found in these essays converge and disperse, crossing over into other disciplines, and creating a unique way of looking at the world, one echoed in Mosley's fictional writings.
This Whitbread Book of The Year Award winner for 1990 is the final novel of the "Catastrophe Practice" series. Set in the 1920s and 30s it tells the story of two young radicals, Max and Eleanor, who meet, love, separate and come together again during the maelstrom of the Spanish Civil War.
Although Nicholas Mosley has written two volumes of family biography and a volume of memoirs, he has, until now, avoided writing about his World War Two experiences. The son of Sir Oswald Mosley who, as the leader of the British Union of Fascists, had been jailed with his second wife, Diana (one of the Mitford sisters), early on in the war ostensibly as a security risk. Despite this, Nicholas was dispatched to join his regiment, the Rifle Brigade, as the Allies fought their way up the Italian peninsula. He came of age in the forcing house of war, surrounded by the constant threat of capture by the Germans. At one point in the Italian campaign this very nearly happened. How Nicholas got away and survived is an example of how sometimes fact can be more bizarre than fiction. Time at War is both an absorbing memoir and an intriguing account of a relationship unlike any other in World War Two. How do you live your life as a soldier fighting the Axis powers when your father is the self-proclaimed British fascist leader?
Religion," this book begins, "is a mistrusted word now," and Nicholas Mosley, in this engaging meditation, seeks to repair that trust. Rather than trying to convince or compel the reader to accept his beliefs, he describes how religion functions in the modern world. Elsewhere, Mosley has written, "There is a subject nowadays which is taboo in the way that sexuality was once taboo, which is to talk about life as if it had any meaning." In this book, he describes religion as the source of that meaning. Despair is the fashionable attitude, but it is one Mosley, here and in his many novels, rejects in favor of a cautious optimism. He writes not to persuade, but to explain a worldview that is refreshing for the hope and intelligence it contains.
Jason is a scriptwriter working on a film about Masada--the fortress where a thousand Jews killed themselves rather than be taken prisoner by the Romans in A. D. 73. He doubts that a film both honest and popular on such a subject can be made, and, while en route to the production site (Jason, producers and stars in first class--his wife and child in tourist), a dispute about the film and a crisis aboard the plane forces Jason to look at his life, his art, and the world around him in several different ways at once.
Returning to London from a trip to the West Indies, an aspiring writer encounters a bewitching trio of friends whose magic lies in their ability to turn any situation into fantasy. Previously out of place in the world, the narrator falls in love with the young brother-sister pair of Peter and Annabelle, as well as the older, more political Marius. Reality soon encroaches upon the foursome, however, in the form of Marius's ailing wife, forcing the narrator to confront the dark emptiness and fear at the heart of his friends' joie de vivre. In this, his second novel—written in the '50s and never before published—Nicholas Mosley weighs questions of responsibility and sacrifice against those of love and earthly desire, the spirit versus the flesh.
Judith is an aspiring young actress and the mistress of a writer on a popular satirical magazine. Her life has increasingly become a dangerous mixture of drugs and self-delusion. When she eventually suffers a breakdown, she seeks healing in an Indian ashram run by an eccentric and even possibly mad guru. But what is at the back of appearances? How calculated is the self-destructiveness from which a new order might emerge? Judith returns to England and joins up with Bert, one of a few friends who have helped her. Bert is making a film about an anti-Bomb demonstration outside a US airbase; the demonstrators have threatened to detonate a bomb themselves in protest. Within this increasingly chaotic setting Judith is led, by way of a search for a lost child of one of her friends, to a place of stillness at the centre. But what attitude makes sense in this sort of world? Who survives? Judith is the third novel based on the interlocking fortunes of the characters in Catastrophe Practise.
Catastrophe Practice, in the form of three plays with prefaces and a novella, follows six characters trying to find their way through some catastrophe that is less in the world outside than in their minds. Drawing upon catastrophe theory to examine the discontinuities in human personality and our tendency to progress suddenly rather than smoothly, the six characters struggle to disrupt traditional ways of being. These characters feel that conventional ways of interpreting the world have become destructive –conventional language, conventional feelings, conventional situations – and try to find a way to realise genuine experience.
As one of the characters in "Assassins" says, "Tolstoy was right, you can't beat the Gods. It's the small things - the warp and woof - that make up the pattern. And how much influence do we have over the small? Now that's a theme for a modern writer." And Nicholas Mosley is this writer. Part political thriller and part love story, "Assassins" explores the "small things" that give shape and meaning to the "big events.
Nicholas Mosley - novelist, biographer, screenwriter and editor - describes his professional life dealing with words and his struggle with the paradox of trying to get at reality through writing. He traces his life in a variety of settings across the world, from the West Indies to the House of Lords, and discusses the writing of his novel series, Catastrophe Practice, the last volume of which won the Whitbread Prize in 1990, and also of a biography of his father, Sir Oswald Mosley.
Reminiscent in theme and style to his Whitbread Award-winning?"Hopeful Monsters," Nicholas Mosley's?"The Hesperides Tree"?tells of a young man frustrated by the inability of his two chosen courses of study--biology and literature--to adequately define the world. Baffled by several life-shaping coincidences that seem to be part of life itself, he embarks on a physical and intellectual journey in search of a girl he fell in love with years earlier. This journey leads him to a deserted island off the coast of Ireland and, perhaps, to the mythical Garden of the Hesperides, home of the Tree of Life.
God is said to have given humans freedom. Yet in the story of Genesis, God is a punishing father figure. Why have humans portrayed him this way? Here, a contemporary writer named Adam imagines God behaving as a good father should, seeing it is time for his children to leave home. Adam writes an account of this, and the story of his own child, Sophie, and his relationship with her. The scene moves from London to New York to Israel to Iran and Iraq. And might not God as well as Adam have a wife to take up the cause if things go wrong?"--BOOK JACKET.
A biography of the First World War poet Julian Grenfell. It helps readers to understand why Julian and his generation seemed to want to die in battle. It also brings Edwardian society to life, as well as describes his relationship with his mother.
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