Serpent

by Nicholas Mosley

Overview

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. He doubts that a film both honest and popular on such a subject can be made, and, while en route to the production site (Jason, producers and stars in first class—his wife and child in tourist), a dispute about the film and a crisis aboard the plane forces Jason to look at his life, his art, and the world around him in several different ways at once.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564782441
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	07/01/2000
Series:	British Literature
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.03(h) x 0.60(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Born in London, Mosley was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford and served in Italy during the Second World War, winning the Military Cross for bravery. He succeeded as 3rd Baron Ravensdale in 1966 and, on the death of his father on 3 December 1980, he also succeeded to the Baronetcy. His father, Sir Oswald Mosley, founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932 and was a supporter of Benito Mussolini. Sir Oswald was arrested in 1940 for his antiwar campaigning, and spent the majority of World War II in prison. As an adult, Nicholas was a harsh critic of his father in "Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family 1933-1980" (1983), calling into question his father's motives and understanding of politics. Nicholas' work contributed to the 1998 Channel 4 television programme titled 'Mosley' based on his father's life. At the end of the mini-series, Nicholas is portrayed meeting his father in prison to ask him about his national allegiance. Mosley began to stammer as a young boy, and attended weekly sessions with speech therapist Lionel Logue in order to help him overcome the speech disorder. Mosley says his father claimed never really to have noticed his stammer, but feels Sir Oswald may have been less aggressive when speaking to him than he was towards other people as a result.

Editorial Reviews

"An exhilerating high-modernist novel of ideas." --Kirkus

Dalkey Archive Press

"Nicholas Mosley is a brilliant novelist who has received nothing like the attention he deserves." --Robert Scholes, Saturday Review

Dalkey Archive Press

"Serpent is an engrossing, if not an explosively original book." --Boston Review

Dalkey Archive Press

From the Publisher

Jason, the protagonist of this muddled novel of ideas, is a scriptwriter doing a movie about Masada, the desert fortress where, according to the account of the Jewish historian Josephus, Jewish rebels in 73 A.D. committed mass suicide rather than surrender to the Romans. The action takes place on a plane taking a group of film people to Israel. En route we learn that the point of Jason's filmscript is that the concept of heroic resistance symbolized by Masada is misguided; Josephus, who decided not to join his brethren and instead capitulated to the Romans, earns Jason's approval as one who chose life over death. Counterpointing Jason's ruminations about the script is the behavior of his wife, who becomes intimately involved with a passenger who may be a hijacker. The story is meant to dramatize the clash between public and private selves, an overarching theme of Mosley's five-novel series, Catastrophe Practice (of which this is the third volume). Events on the plane are supposed to parallel the episode at Masada, but the analogies are strained. This is a revision of a novel originally published in England in 1981. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This unorthodox satire by Nicholas Mosley, who won Britain's Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1990 for his novel Hopeful Monsters, confirms his delicate, slightly peculiar talent for extracting moving insights from heady fictional terrain.
—New York Times Book Review

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