The world is a mess. People lie, steal, and kill. Fear replaces reason. Madness abounds. The best course of action? According to the narrator in Look at the Dark, sit back and laugh. This nameless protagonist, the victim of a mysterious Manhattan hit-and-run just after 9/11, uses the forced idleness of convalescence to take stock of his life and times. Turning immobility and flights of morphine-induced fancy into something like enlightenment, the man finally comes to terms with two marriages, an estranged son, a mysteriously pregnant stepdaughter, and a drug-dealing, ex-wife-wooing pal. Though emotionally detached, egg-headed, and generally weird, the narrator seems a magnet for children, would-be revolutionaries, and sexually available women. In fact, much of Look at the Dark's charm comes from Mosley's ingenuity in casting the dazzling throng of supporting characters that spin through the revolving door of the narrator's personal life. Ultimately, however, Mosley humors his protagonist's amiable egotism, and much of the book dwells on the mullings, deductions, and doubts housed in the narrator's own few pounds of grey matter. Luckily for readers, one morning's coffee inspires more speculation in our hero than most people come upon in a week, so the book suffers no lack of density. However, the novel's greatest challenge is whether readers can swallow his sometimes unsettling, sometimes half-baked ideas.

Mosley's narrator may be the most enlightened, the most dangerous, or the most inconsequential character to appear in recent fiction. Perhaps he is all three. In a universe of infinite mystery, he claims, the wisest man is he who recognizes his own utterly irremediable ignorance. To that end, he forgoes any attempt to make sense of the haphazard bungles and minor miracles that together constitute his life, preferring to "just let it settle, so that the water becomes clear, and one can see the shells, the starfish, on the sand at the bottom...." This placid snorkeling over one's experiences no doubt has a certain Zen-like charm befitting monks and old people. But while the narrator is both aging and eccentrically spiritual, his account suggests that he was already something of a life-snorkeler from his youth in Oxford and early marriage: "we were to be part of a post-war world becoming different from the old." The "how" of this proposition remains unanswered, except for a few briefly sketched love scenes. For the most part, he seems to think that one simply rides the wave of history. When circumstance brings him to a crossroads, he again invokes "The Age" as both supply and demand of his actions; at a mixed-race party in Africa, "this was the time at the end of empire when old traditions were breaking up and there was uncertainty about what would be commitments."

In defining individuals by their historical moment, the narrator diminishes their personal agency for good or ill, making history instead into a force of nature—something akin to gravity. To ask individuals to take charge of their own history would be to ask apples to stop falling from trees. He does not appreciate the fact that, chance aside, people make history and not the other way around. To believe otherwise allows the narrator a dangerous denial of responsibility—dangerous to the backbone of selfhood and the will, without which the "art" that he holds as the one thing of "unequivocal validity" would not exist.

The narrator's deterministic bent works on the small scale, too, in the unfolding chronology of a life. Reflecting on the chain of events by which a morally questionable affair with a teenage girl led to his quirky but loving second marriage, the narrator marvels how "things [have] a pattern of their own if you risk them; you cannot plot them; you can either deny that such patterning exists or raise your hat to it respectfully." His wisdom lies in his humility, and surely life becomes far richer when one pauses to marvel at the cryptic beauty of apparent fate. Again however, he treads murky moral ground by suggesting that an action which could be deemed "wrong" can become justifiable, even "right," if it unwittingly leads to future good. By this logic, I might be appreciative of World War II, since it made my grandparents more heroic and resourceful than they might otherwise have become. A Christian might "raise his hat" to Pontius Pilate, whose assent to a crucifixion assured a critical step in salvation dogma. Mosley bravely constructs a character willing and able to spin ethical philosophy on its head and chuckle as the world goes green in the face.

Nicholas Mosley's harshest critics and most fervent disciples all unfailingly label his books—Natalia Natalia, the Whitbread-winning Hopeful Monsters, The Hesperides Tree —"novels of ideas." He seems to like the term himself, which he invoked in 1991 upon quitting the Man Booker Prize committee. By his account, Mosley resigned when his picks, all "ideas" novels, were snubbed in favor of more aesthetic or virtuosic entries, however intellectually flimsy. His narrator crusades in his stead, and laments a world in which "message... had become deeply unfashionable."

Just what the narrator's message is composed of remains unclear, though in fairness, he admits it "could not be put into precise words... I argued against meaninglessness and political correctness: I recommended exploration, and trying things out. But I became discouraged: I could so easily be made a fool of!" Broadly speaking, he claims that some grandly incomprehensible force (God, more or less, without the anthropomorphizing or denominational connotations) orders the universe and gives meaning to life. Our only obligation is acknowledgment—good news for a man of letters like our narrator, whose intellectual chatter takes on near-sacramental significance. Occasionally, Mosley lets his delight in metaphysical speculation squash the vitality of the novel. Philosophy students often laugh at the clunky verisimilitude of Plato's Socratic Dialogues, in which the Socrates character expounds his wisdom while the other "character" is mute but for conversational gems like "Yes, Socrates" and "That is most true." We can forgive Plato, who never claimed to be a great storyteller, but Mosley should have better control of his craft than to allow such "dialogues" in which one speaker muses on the "big ideas"—life, love, death, truth—while the other adds the periodic "yes," "right," or "I see" for seasoning.

To dwell overmuch on the novel's "ideas" and their execution is to miss the lavish icing to Mosley's thought-heavy cake: the imagistic vignettes that pop up in the most unexpected and delightful places. In Look at the Dark's final third, after all the major characters and conflicts have entered and exited several times, Mosley indulges in a long and fantastical trip to the zoo, undertaken by the narrator and a parade of handicapped children he meets by chance on the street: "We set off along the pavement with my one crutch making me lopsided like a boat in a high wind, the girl and the boy on the other side to balance me, the rest of the children string out behind like the tail of a kite." And just when the narrator's infidelities and analytic dissection of relationships outweigh his brief flickers of emotion, Mosley returns to the distant memory of the narrator's one passionate love affair. Their lovemaking was alternatively like "clouds," "landscapes," and "ghosts," and after the experience, our protagonist is moved to recite "Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins—a rather academic response, certainly, but also a lovely and touching one.

Amidst these fully realized memory images, tinier motifs attempt to weave a new typology for the narrator's life and, I suspect, his sweeping notion of our times. Adam of Genesis prefigures Adam, the narrator's son, both fazed by moral boundaries but willing to have a go at a radically new and original existence. The Tower of Babel, the ivory tower, and of course the Twin Towers are linked together by some inscrutable weft in the divine tapestry. More than mere wordplay, these images haunt even the tough-skinned narrator, as he worries in New York "that tall towers might fall and crush one; bodies holding hands come tumbling like confetti." Look at the Dark frequently privileges idea over object, pattern over piece. Yet even in the narrator's effort to look at life's biggest components—at the light, at the dark—he invariably stumbles on the treacherous grays of human doubt. The limitation of a mind, perhaps, but the redemption of a novel.

 

Laura Kolbe '08 appreciates pied beauty, particularly brinded cows.