God's Hazard is a Safe Bet
Nicholas Mosley Continues to Dazzle With His New Novel
Nicholas Mosley is, pure and simple, the most neglected great writer of the 20th century. Well, make that the 21st century: Mosley, born in England in 1923, has just published his 17th novel, God’s Hazard. For Mosley devotees, it is another welcome example of his positive yet unsentimental philosophy, and his singular approach to the novel form (and the mesmerizing way these two working parts overlap and feed off of each other), and in addition comes wrapped in one big stylistic surprise.
And for those who have only read Mosley’s most well known work, the monumental Hopeful Monsters, this new much shorter novel would serve as a fascinating distillation of familiar themes. And for those who have never read any of Mosley’s novels, God’s Hazard is not a bad place to start.
Leaving Home and Entering the World
God’s Hazard is essentially the story of one of the world’s supreme metaphors: Adam and Eve’s fall from the Garden of Eden. But this is no ordinary retelling. Adam, a writer, and his wife, Evie, and their daughter Sophie, reside in contemporary London. Adam is working on a story about a character called “Old Man” who is obsessed with getting his now grown-up children to leave home.
And this is no overly clever and yet simple fable, either. Readers who stick with the conceit will soon be exploring ideas surrounding everything from pornography to global warming to The Koran to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the nuclear threat from Iran and North Korea, and will go beyond the bounds of London to New York and Iraq, among other places. They will also be treated to one of the most complex renderings of the intricate relationships among the concepts of evil, human freedom, and human evolution, since John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Beyond Tragedy and Comedy
Mosley, whose dominant way of working for many years has been to write in the first person, employs the third person in this new novel, which works nicely as a kind of reflection of God’s omniscience. But the basic tenor of Mosley’s unique approach to novel writing remains intact.
While most past or contemporary novels deal exclusively with the fate of characters exposed to outer events, and are embalmed in overriding concepts like tragedy and comedy, Mosley has developed a style that seeks to capture characters’ inner awareness and comprehension of their lives as they stream forward. The result is a feeling of stillness at the center that may take new readers of Mosley aback, as it requires participation in an imaginative effort that goes beyond linear storytelling into a subtle, almost dimensionless intellectual world where “spiritual” improvement is a real possibility.
In an age of big publisher’s dwindling commitment to serious literature, and often narrow thinking about what fiction writing can contribute to our culture, the 86-year-old Mosley seems more than ever like a fresh hope for the future.
Title: God’s Hazard
Author: Nicholas Mosley
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press, March 2009, 199 pages, $13.95
ISBN: 978-1-56478-540-4
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