A novel about ideas
Francis King
HOPEFUL MONSTER by Nicholas Mosley
Secker & Warburg, £14.95, pp. 551
This novel, although self-contained, is apparently the last of a herd of jumbos corralled together as a series under the title Catastrophe Practice. I shall certainly seek out its predecessors in due course; but for the moment, having slithered down from its howdah after having swayed, at an inexorably sedate pace, over miles and miles of sometimes arid territory, my one wish is, metaphorically, first to stretch out in a chair and then to have a stiff drink.
What we have here is not so much a novel of ideas as a novel about ideas. Its two central characters, an English student of biology and physics, called Max, and a German Jewish student of anthropology, called Eleanor, take it in turns to tell the stories of their lives, interlinked first by friendship and then by marriage. Now by chance and now by intention, they find themselves struggling to swim through the perilous cross-currents of most of the major political, scientific and philosophical controversies of their times. As the self- styled 'correlator' of their narratives (i.e. presumably Mosley himself) puts it near the close, 'the over-all pattern' of Max's and Eleanor's story in this volume has been `one of trying to learn how to deal with the patterns of the self-destructive society they were part of.' Max, offspring of a biologist father and a psychoanalyst mother, meets such Cam- bridge notabilities of the interwar years as Kapitsa and Wittgenstein; he is taken up by a homosexual Apostle, presumably modelled on Anthony Blunt, who says such improbable things as 'You're so sharp, ducky, take care you don't circum- cise yourself and 'Ducky, stop being an organ-grinder, and on the concrete situa- tion start sharpening a few knives'; he spends seven months as a student at the Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Odes- sa. Eleanor, offspring of a philosopher father and a communist mother, meets Rosa Luxemburg, 'most popular and most bewitching of the leader of the extremists', and herself becomes involved in the strug- gle from which the Nazis eventually emerge as victors and the communists as vanquished; she escapes to Switzerland to avoid sharing the fate of her mother in a concentration camp; she travels with fellow anthropologists to Africa. Eventually both Max and Eleanor find themselves in Spain during the Civil War. There is something diagrammatic about the way in which the author presents now one, now the other and now both these young people as being present at least on the periphery of any major intellectual or political event of their times.
Constantly recurring is the battle be- tween Darwinists and Lamarckians. Can acquired characteristics be inherited? Early on in the book the real-life Dr Kammerer, subject of Arthur Koestler's fascinating The Midwife Toad, stays with Max's parents in Cambridge. Possibly he becomes the lover of Max's mother; cer- tainly he comes into conflict with Max's father, who thinks him a charlatan for having claimed that examples of Salaman- dra atra, bred by him in captivity, have inherited the acquired characteristics of their parents. Later, we are presented with another aspect of the same controversy when, in Odessa, Max attends a lecture on the subject of the claim of the Soviet scientist Lysenko to have produced a strain of wheat the characteristics of which have been passed on genetically.
In their dogged scrutiny of all the major intellectual trends of the time, in their total lack of humour or even irony, and in their love of regurgitating whatever they have chewed up and swallowed of other people's ideas, Eleanor and Max are extraordinarily like each other. Both have had unorthodox sexual experiences, Max with his mother and Eleanor with girls, and both display all undue interest in buggery — the action and the word repeatedly recurring in both their narratives. The result is that they eventual- ly seem to merge into each other, the male and female halves of a single personality.
The cast of the novel is huge, taking in real people, people half real and half fictional, and people wholly fictional. With rare exceptions — homosexual Mervyn is one — all speak in precisely the same manner, with no variation of vocabulary or even of rhythm. A writer like Evelyn Waugh can largely dispense with such pointers as 'X said', 'Y answered', `Z interrupted' etc, since what is said at once makes evident who is saying it. Had Mosley dispensed with such pointers, the result would have been disastrous.
The two things that are extremely im- pressive about this book are, first, its intellectual energy and rigour and, second- ly, Mosley's gift, rivalling Koestler's or Bertrand Russell's, for summarising ex- tremely difficult ideas in an easily intelligi- ble manner. Husserl, Heidegger, Dirac, Bohr, Heisenberg, Rutherford: readers of this book may enjoy the illusion, however brief, of having grasped what all these eminent and often enigmatic people were after. Here, for example, is Mosley/Max on Heidegger: . . . Heidegger seemed to be saying . . . that 'certainly' could not be put in words; it was to do with an attitude, a state of mind, a performance: words were good for saying what things were not; they were not good for saying what things were.
The contrast between the clarity of such exposition of ideas and the mistiness of much of the narration and character draw- ing is at once piquant and disconcerting.
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