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the complete review - fiction

Look at the Dark

by
Nicholas Mosley

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B : rambling philosophising, with some appeal

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "The English novelist Mosley most closely resembles in his philosophical ambition is Iris Murdoch, who also regarded the novel as embodying a kind of moral outlook. As with her, it seems reasonable to measure Mosley’s novels against the standards set by his criticism. And by these, Look at the Dark must be judged a failure. This isn’t, as with many English novels, a failure of ambition -- it’s an aesthetic failure that is felt at the level of the sentence, in the grimly unmetaphorical prose and in the carelessness of Mosley’s descriptions" - Jonathan Derbyshire, Financial Times
  
  
• "Like its narrator, this rather beautiful book, pitched somewhere between the phenomenologically insubstantial novels of Maurice Blanchot and the existential mask-play of Kundera's The Incredible Lightness of Being, smiles slightly creepily but offers no reply." - James Flint, The Guardian
  
  
• "Mosley captures all the hesitation and humor of daily life with one eye on that other level of existence -- the world of intuition, ghosts; the tentative fabric of life and all its fraying ends." - Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "(H)ere there are pages of dialogue in which wires are deliberately crossed, language malfunctions and meaning is lost. Mosley follows the imperative of his title: the novel is a study of opacity. (...) This book isn't just about darkling language. It's also a meditation on mortality. (...) There is a pleasure in the delicately calibrated patterning, which sparks synapses and gets the cerebral fluids flowing. Without much narrative structure, though, the book rambles and stutters, as though aping the desiccated mumblings of a man about to die." - Alastair Sooke, Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "I would like Look at the Dark to be a very good work of fiction, but, somehow, I feel that though it has high ambitions, ambitions alien to the English novel and with which I am in sympathy, it fails to find a form to realize them." - Gabriel Josipovici, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The narrator of Look at the Dark is a retired English academic, "an anthroplogist with a special interest in language and literature". Among his theories is that language is "a curse as well as a boon", allowing for deception as much as actual communication.
       His challenging pronouncements make him a sought-after commentator, and he's invited to the United States to appear on television in 2002, prepared to say some fairly shocking things. Before he has a chance to, he gets run down and winds up in hospital with a serious leg injury. This, in turn, gives him the opportunity to look back on his life.
       His first wife, Valerie, re-enters his life -- pretending to still be married to him, in order to cover his hospital expenses. (He doesn't want to bother his second, current wife, Valentina, so makes no effort to get in touch with her.) His family situation is fairly odd, but then he's a guy who met his second wife by following a girl (her daughter) home on a bus and then just staying with them.
       The next generation -- his son Adam and step-daughter Cathy -- also have some issues of their own, all of which he is fairly slow at working out and piecing together.
       Among the background stories slowly revealed is his role in having rescued and/or seduced a girl from Iran, Nadia. As with much of his past, it is yet another event shrouded in ambiguity.
       With the odd family dynamics, a touch of international intrigue (Valerie's boyfriend, the wealthy Charlie Richtoven, is mixed up in something, and asks for his advice -- an act of complete desperation), as well as commentary on the international political situation, Mosley offers a rambling take on modern life and civilisation.
       The narrator has his little ready-for-TV spiel, but recognises he can only ride it so far:

I would say -- But humans do not like peace, they are at home in war: they cannot stand happiness, they require resentment and complaint. There was for a time a demand for this sort of thing; but I needed to extend my repertoire if I was not to become a bore.

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Links:

• Dalkey Archive Press publicity page
• Vintage publicity page

• The Globe and Mail
• The Guardian
• Kirkus Reviews
• The Los Angeles Times (scroll down for review)
• Publishers Weekly
• RALPH (scroll down for review)
• Scotland on Sunday
• The Scotsman
• Sunday Telegraph
• The Washington Times

• Obituary in The Guardian
• Reading Nicholas Mosley by Shiva Rahbaran
• A Conversation with Nicholas Mosley by John O’Brien
• Interview with Nicholas Mosley by Alex Kovacs

• Accident
• Experience and Religion
• Inventing God
• Time at War

• See Index of Contemporary British fiction under review
• Other books from Dalkey Archive Press under review

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About the Author:

       British author Nicholas Mosley lived 1923 to 2017.

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© 2006-2021 the complete review

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