Nothing at all like I had anticipated and the most pleasant literary surprise I've experienced since Iain Sinclair's Downriver. Incredibly precise and measured, thoughtful almost to the point of ponderousness, philosophically heavy and deft at the same time, working its peculiarly compulsive and latticed progress through a pair of peripatetic and enigmatic souls in the interwar period—Eleanor Anders and Max Ackerman—who experience what might be termed gravitational love, the interlinking of thought processes, philosophical developments, life experiences, and physical attractions stemming from a particulate collision between them upon their first meeting as younglings at a Volkswanderung gathering in the early nineteen-twenties; two individuals alienated and harmonized as they survey the double-helix of science and philosophy evolving along with them—and wending the rippling and erupting terrain of a Europe convulsed by the rise and spread of Communism, Fascism, Anarchism, and Anti-Semitism and tunneling through the Stalinist Purges, the Spanish Civil War, and, of course, the Second World War—towards something quite special: a breaching of the patterned surface of our predicament in order to attune consciousness to the symphonic currents of chance which carry along the waters of lived reality.Mosley's considerable erudition is on display throughout, but in a manner entirely copacetic to and in furtherance of the themes he is exploring via his pseudo-epistolary narrative pairing. His elegant fastidiousness exists for a purpose; and thus many of the stylistic complaints I've read about—here and elsewhere—regarding the way in which he constructs his dialogues and interiorities, while arguably valid on the aesthetic level, are functionally tone-deaf—and fuck it, this is a beautiful work of art, with exquisite moments that are revealed in phrases—often set up a hundred or two pages back—that strike the literary heart like a hammer blow, impart their passionate wisdom with a fiery kiss, or blossom with a fragrance that weakens the knees with its poignant timeliness. Yet with that said, I might hesitate in recommending this across the board—this is some dense, pause-and-ponder-per-paragraph quality stuff, with an intricate and subtle marriage between story development and the minute probing of human consciousness within the fields of science, philosophy, history, sexuality, psychology, warfare, and evolution, all set to the musical accompaniment of that old human chestnut kith-and-kin. In other words, you might have to be in the mood for five-hundred-and-fifty pages in which every level of existence is examined, questioned, shaken and stirred, as much for the reader to pursue and develop as the characters within—and not the least important of the questions undertaken is that of determining whether human beings are, at heart, irremediably insane—portrait models and stage actors all frozen and frenzied in scapes and scenes of a demented hue and cry—and doomed to one-day snuff the flame out entirely ere evolutionary progression has advanced to a stage at which another candle may be lit; and why such an inherent destructive madness may be a vital constituent element of mankind's capacity to mount the aforementioned, tallow-endowing stage.It may be that existence requires hopeful monsters, mutations hatched upon the world before their time—of which the Jews may have been an early exemplar—who, in surviving in an environment hostile to their altered being, may exert a profound effect upon it: the masses, maze-bound and trapped, desperately trying to grip and follow an elusive thread through the passageways whilst avoiding the nasty bumps and protuberances in the corners, cannot see that they are held in their circular absorptions, their gravity-born stasis, locked into construing patterns from historical shapes and remembrances that, in their half-truths and ritualized routines, at times frozen snapshots as in a vast painting, serve to make life endurable. One of the most encompassing of these patterns is language, an invention to describe the inventions we have imposed in palimpsests upon our existence in an attempt to supersede our predicament—and both Max and Eleanor ponder whether, if God is Silence, our complex languages, in such a vast array of flavors and textures, have not irrecoverably removed his Heaven from our reach, if not our comprehension. In symbols and mythologies we have packaged much of what struck our primordial sensibilities as being true, though with each revolution of the wheel such codings became more difficult to discern and decipher; and now, in a life filled with coincidences once deemed divine will, with experimentations reaching down into the realm of the invisible where once were cast spells, we can intuit—but not realize—the desirability of conjoining the inside and the outside worlds. The monsters might just be able to not only see the predicament, but see through it—and, if monstrous enough, able to crack the patterns sufficiently to allow a portion of the light beyond to shine forth and reveal itself to those wrapped-up in themselves and continually being struck in the back of the head by the tunnel-vision stares with which they view their lives. *********************************************************Some rambling thoughts that occurred to me once I'd set this extraordinary Whitbread-winning wonder aside:Humans exhibiting particle behavior—the wave form of energy, the all, become the particle form of the individual: the fact of being observed enters the observer into the reality of that which is being examined and alters its essential nature. The individual who perceives himself performs—changes—before the stare of the other, who then perceives the person who pantomimes before their senses in a singular manner—thus every solitary soul inhabits a sensory universe unique to themselves. Humans as wave/particle dualities; gravity inhering in souls. Quantum uncertainty as a metauniversal bedrock—reality the patterns established upon this cosmic chanciness by our conscious minds in order to make living bearable. The circularity of determining whether consciousness arose from the universe or the universe arose from consciousness—when we fully understand this paradox will we have moved further towards what it is that we are/are meant to be?The power unleashed by the breaking apart of the atom as the power released by the shattering of patterns of consciousness—such a force, immanent with the potentiality for catastrophe, a required energy for the augmentation of humanity's capacity for elevating itself to a higher tier along the evolutionary progression; the power to destroy and the power to create the dialectic by which we can conceive of new permutations of our existence within an uncertain cosmos and reassemble new patterns that encode this information for the stabilizing of living reality; the light of observation circling the universe—bent by gravity—to strike the observer in the back of the head; perceived existence to be settled to be overturned to be settled anew, the cycle of life as ordered with consciousness' evolving understanding of the constitution of reality.The hopeful monsters who are alienated from their species existing level of evolution are as the emitted alpha particles from an instance of radioactive decay in existence; if two such particles should collide, do they impart a portion—a gravitron?—of their being to the other, such that at any given moment each bears an influence upon the other? If one such being was observed and thus altered in nature to reflect the intrusion of the observer, could its linked companion be known without the disturbing interference of the other being brought to bear? Would two such particulate beings, ever drawn towards their mutated kin in the swim of time, have the capacity to course with this gravitational attraction to the degree of rising above the patterned routines of the everyday world and espying the ebb-and-flow of chanciness that stirs and directs encoded existence? Would this higher-level awareness enhance the wherewithal of such a pairing of decayed progeny to lift their maze-bound brethren out of their tessellated torpor and unto this elevated evolutionary tier? Would this process constitute a ladder that rises towards the Godhead, The Patternless State, Silence?The development of the atomic bomb the logical result of the bifurcations of man's love of power and fear of power, man's longing for death as a surceasing and for the death of others as an easing. The emergence of a means for enacting these desires/terrors lifts us to a new position on the board, one from which—with the appropriate understanding of what has occurred—we can look down from above at where we were and the route we took.One of the most interesting aspects of Max and Eleanor's long unconsummated love affair was the lack of jealously—for the most part—displayed by either, despite their being aware of the growing number of lovers that the heart-made-fonder absentee was taking on. It was handled quite subtly by Mosley, a well-proportioned admixture of the destructive aspects of jealousy that the two witnessed as youths—Max in the possessiveness of his mother, Eleanor in the bitterness of her mother—together with the glamour-shredding clarity they were able to bring to bear upon the tragic and ruinous elements immanent within the human condition.Towards the end of the book, Max muses about mutations and the decay of radioactive matter, and how we can encompass our understanding of the word random within the statistical probability of such a particle emission; therefore, are mutations simply an instance of the state of being observed? Is the evolutionary process of life on this planet dependent upon the production of beings whose gaze (consciousness?) allows the probability of mutation to come into play? Should an increasing mass of cognizant beings realize an increasing likelihood of genetic mutations occurring? In regard to something like cancer, a cellular affliction, would we chart an increase in the number of cancer cases above what would be consistent with a leveled rise in the population to reflect this correlation? If the universe contains a sufficiently large enough number of observers, would it begin to undergo mutations at a dramatic rate?
Two notions haunt the characters in this story: the story of the 7 righteous Jews and the biological concept of the "hopeful monsters." Do the actions, choices, etc. of the main characters in facing the social, political, and moral changes occurring in post-World War I Europe mean they are part of the former story? Or are they and do they remain only the "hopeful monsters," creatures born slightly before their time when it's not known if the environment is quite ready for them. It's a clear moral question that demands rationale consideration by Max and Eleanor, the main characters in the novel. Unfortunately, for the novel, the characters seem all too secondary to the big events happening in Europe: the coming of the Nazis in Germany and the victory of the Fascists in Spain, the nightmares of Stalinist Russia, the theories of Freudian psychoanalysis, the relativity of atomic physics, the philosophy of the ambiguity and power of language. It's all too hard to really care about Max and Eleanor and that's the weakness of the novel. In a story that is really about the moral choices of its characters against the evolving backdrop of profound historical events, the reader needs to care about those characters in order for the story to work and its message to hit home. You don't and the message gets lost in the clunky use of sentence structure to convey every spoken word and the sequence of patterns of thoughts that the author uses deliberately to ensure the reader know who is saying what and the precise sequence of statements, thoughts, etc. of the characters. So, yeah, it's a book about "ambitious" ideas, as one reviewers says, but it's just too much of a slog to easily enjoy this so-characterized by the same reviewer "amazing achievement."
What do You think about Hopeful Monsters (2000)?
I loved this book. I first read it many years ago after picking it up in an English-language bookstore in Milan, and I've probably read it a half a dozen times since. Something about the prose is hypnotic. The history is fascinating. The philosophical backdrop is riveting. The romantic student movement that led up to the Nazi regime is something I knew nothing about. And the author's cold-eyed analysis of everyone - Nazis and socialists alike - feels so very true. Finally, I am so, so intrigued that Mr. Moseley's father was apparently the head of the fascist party in England during World War II (what a piece of work he must have been!) - and the more recent stories of modern-day Moseley family members getting busted at Nazi-themed costume/sex parties. What a bizarre heritage. No wonder he had to write this book.
—Sylvia
Good Heavens, so how about a book that relates a German Jew girl, an English boy, atomic bombs, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Franco, Hitler, homosexuality, Communism, Fascism, Schrödingers Cat, fission, pilgrimage, prostitution, war crimes, diamond trade, Hitler, Stalin, Kammerer, genetics, lizzards, Oedipal conflicts, triangular love relations and weird sexual fetishism? And even more? Welcome to 'Hopeful Monsters'. Welcome to one hell of a ride.I can hear protest coming my way by now. "But Science is so boring! I want to explore the world and live and love and be part of history!". Why not both? Mosley effortlessly combines science and fiction in this magnificent novel about the Jewish Eleanor Anders and the British Max Ackerman. It's roughly an epistolary novel, but if you were expecting just another love story, well, think again.Who cares about some guy named Max any way? Or some chick called Eleanor? This book is about humanity and humankind as a whole. Central to the book are the prevalent ideas on evolution of Charles Darwin - to evolve, there must be certain creatures that differ from their counterparts in a way which allows them to have a certain advantage over them. (Think of it as one giraffe having a slightly longer neck than the others, permitting it to eat more leaves and thus survive more easily). These creatures are the 'hopeful monsters', emissaries of change and eventually improvement of existing species. Story-wise this means that Max and Eleanor will identify with these 'hopeful monsters'.The context is the main reason for this concordance. I mean, pre-World War II Europe was a pretty mad place. Fascist tried to kill Communists who tried to kill Trotskyists who tried to kill Stalinists who tried to kill Fascists (again I suppose) who tried to kill Jews who didn't really try to kill any body except anarchists I guess because everyone seems to want to kill anarchists in this book. There's a whole lot of destruction going on, ultimately. Great attention is given to the image of 'the Bomb', the ultimate weapon of destruction which should stop the war dead in its tracks. Operation Manhattan, primarily out of fear that the Nazi's should develop a similar weapon before the Allied troops. THERE IS SO MUCH SCIENCE IN THIS BOOK. Mosley is incredibly intelligent, as he manages to interweave complex philosophy and physics with personality traits of Max, Eleanor and the other characters, culminating in some sort of brilliant spaghetti bolognaise of erudite writing. BUT IT'S ALSO A LOVE STORY. Max and Eleanor seem to be two gravitational poles attracting and repelling each other throughout the book, meeting at random moments in each other's lives. Their conversations seem almost surreal, any given character in this book is way too incredible and strong to actually exist, but isn't that just what we love in a good book? The capacity to transcend ourselves and our own boring perception of events?'Hopeful Monsters' does all this, and it does so quite brilliantly. I've been complaining about the lack of ambition in contemporary fiction (well, in Belgium any way) and this book proves that it can still be done! It's a huge feat by MC Mosley, a slam dunk, a modern White Album by the Beatles, hell, it beats Big Brother. Seriously though, you should read this novel/philosophic treaty/scientific introduction to everything. I feel enlightened up to the point that there will never be any more darkness in the universe. Ever.PS: For a more in-depth and serious review, I recommend Chris's review which is very thorough and more than worth reading. (More than this bravo review any way).PPS : I had typed another (more serious) review of this but I pushed the wrong button and it all disappeared (alas). I spent ten consecutive hours crying, cursing the Prophet, throwing egg shells at Justin Bieber's house and eating Ben & Jerry's but now I'm feeling better. Thanks.
—Tom
A very ambitious novel, part love story, part philosophical treatise. Takes on Darwinism, and Lamarckism, particle physics, the atom bomb, relativity, chance and fate, communism, fascism, creative and destructive forces in human nature, and of course, the nature of love. At times it drags, and the main characters' Freudian relationships with their parents were a bit annoying and heavy-handed. The last chapter tried to wrap up too many threads at once and came off a bit rushed and stilted. But overall, it was a mentally stimulating read as well as an entertaining story. It would have been worth reading even if only for the refresher course in European politics leading up to WWII. I recommend.
—Sewella
