LOOK AT THE DARK
by Nicholas Mosley
Secker Warburg £16.99, 256 pages

The unnamed narrator of Nicholas Mosley’s latest novel is a retired academic with a flourishing second career playing “gadfly to the ox of political correctness” on radio and television. He rides other “hobby horses” too, lambasting the seductions of fundamentalism and the false consolations of religion, insisting on the difference between conventional morality and virtue, and hammering away at a thesis about the impossibility of truth-telling and the redemptive possibilities of great art.

At least two of these preoccupations, the one about morality and the one about truth-telling, seem to derive from the narrator’s scarcely credible emotional history. This comprises two marriages, to Valerie and Valentina (”might there have been some riddling agenda here?” the narrator asks); an adulterous liaison on his first honeymoon with a one-legged African woman (whom he meets 50 years later at a dinner hosted by a civil servant); strained and distant relationships with a son and a step-daughter; retirement in murky circumstances from his post at Oxford; and a fling with Nadia, whom he befriends on an anthropological field trip to pre-revolutionary Iran and spirits away from that soon-to-be-benighted country.

In Proustian fashion, this fantastic story is recollected rather than straightforwardly narrated. Lured to New York by an invitation to speak about terrorism on television, and by the thought that he might bump into Valerie, the narrator is knocked down by a van as he steps off a sidewalk. In hospital, and saved from the vagaries of US medical insurance by the largesse of Valerie’s mysterious lover, Charlie von Richtoven, he revisits his relationships with his wives. This effort of remembering poses an aesthetic and moral challenge. First, how to give literary shape to these memories? And second, how to “make acceptable what is not suited to being said?”

Mosley tries to solve these problems by allowing multiple time schemes to co-exist and by insinuating, rather than imposing, connections between them. This lends the novel an attractively hallucinatory quality that the author then attempts to discipline towards the end, mainly by engineering a number of unsatisfactory plot twists involving Henderson, a civil servant who turns out to be married to the narrator’s African lover, and Charlie, who may or may not be a drug baron on the run from Mossad.

The moral and aesthetic difficulties signalled explicitly by the narrator are precisely those that Mosley has explored in his critical writings. He locates his fictional practice in the “great tradition” of novelist-moralists (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James), whose work doesn’t so much prescribe the way to live as stimulate in the reader, through its attentiveness to the messy privacies of human lives, the cultivation of a properly moral sense. For Mosley, what distinguishes human beings from other animals is what he calls “creative consciousness”. Achieving an authentic existence is a matter of self-creation, which the form of the novel is well-suited to describing or exemplifying.

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 (a man is seen speaking on a mobile phone in an episode apparently set in the late 1970s while, in the present day, the narrator’s telephone “jangles inharmoniously”).

It is hard not to interpret the extravagant praise given to Mosley’s previous novels as a symptom of what the critic James Wood once called the “English confinement” - a parochialism that ensures a soft landing for any novelist with vaguely speculative proclivities, and that also reminds us that the novel of ideas in English is still largely unconquered terrain.