Serpent

Catastrophe Practice #3

by Nicholas Mosley

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. Jason doubts that a film both honest and popular on such a subject can be made. The story of Serpent takes place on the airplane taking a party of VIP film people to Israel. The dispute about the film—concerning the nature of loyalty, of sacrifice for the good of society—runs parallel with an actual drama that unfolds on the plane: between Jason, his wife Lilia, a man she befriends (who may or may not be a hijacker), and the show-business people in first class. A climax is reached in which the conflicts on the plane, Jason's fanciful ideas for a script on Masada, memories of his past life, and a contemporary crisis in Israel all seem to run parallel and even nudge one another—at least in imagination. The plane comes down to earth . . .
This is the third novel in Mosley's acclaimed Catastrophe Practice series.

"Engrossing, interesting, highly complex, at times suddenly flat, Serpent remains part of a serious inquiry into complex issues of art and life; and we don't get enough of this in the often light world of the contemporary novel." (Malcolm Bradbury, Vogue)

"As in a number of his books, Mosley explores the ways in which conventions, whether social, moral, or artistic, can be a form of imprisonment, inhibiting responses, closing the doors of perception instead of opening them. . . . Serpent is very much about the responsibility entailed by this awakening, and about how life can be made a 'successfully going concern.'" (Times Literary Supplement)

"Like so much of Mosley's recent fiction, the script aims at 'seeing things in two ways at once.' The extracts from it that we are shown are full of intellectual trampolining, jugglings with myth, tightrope-walkings between farce and grimness, tonal somersaults. . . . Like everything else in Serpent, they derive from a willingness to take risks in emulating the dartingly various nature of thought and response. Mosley's novel tackles intelligently the difficulty of communicating the complex." (The Listener 12-10-81)

"Serpent is an engrossing, if not an explosively original book." (Boston Review 12-89)

"Successful fictional meditation on the necessity of role-playing. . . . An exhilarating high-modernist novel of ideas." (Kirkus Reviews 11-15-89)

Genres: Fiction, British Literature

208 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1981

About the author

Nicholas Mosley was educated at Eton and Oxford. He served in Italy during World War II, and published his first novel, Spaces of the Dark, in 1951. His book Hopeful Monsters won the 1990 Whitbread Award.

Mosley was the author of several works of nonfiction, most notably the autobiography Efforts at Truth and a biography of his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, entitled Rules of the Game/Beyond the Pale.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

The third instalment in Mosley’s Catastrophe Practice quintet takes place on a plane bound for the Red Sea and focuses on a screenwriter named Jason struggling with his somewhat metafictional Roman epic (parts of which are included in the novel), and his loudmouth producer, cast members, and assorted unhinged airborne ragamuffins. Meanwhile, his wife is taken into the aeroplane lavatory where an uncomfortable stranger undoes his trousers to reveal a rather constricting cock-ring that only an oral salivary application will help unbind. This is a Mosley novel, so the characters speak in hyper-intellectual epithets and think the mundane stuff, often with several dozen unneeded tags before each statement and thought. The antics and ideas are as usual unique, and the presentation unlike anything in any other off-kilter novel, and even if the connection between the Jewish self-massacre at Masada in 73AD and a group of monied turds in first-class is tenuous, the fun and pace of the novel is unignorable. Those seeking the lyricism of Impossible Object or Hopeful Monsters will be chagrined.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

there's some cool stuff in here but i found the style kind of irritating to read

[Julie Alisa]

At the point where I last left off, before I forgot this book on a flight, I was enjoying it quite a bit and would have given it at least a solid three star rating. I will edit this review when I finish reading it after whenever I manage to obtain another copy. I am definitely looking forward to doing so.

[Jacob Wren]

"What is magical, is when what you are talking about begins to happen at the same time."