Accident

by Nicholas Mosley

"Accident," Nicholas Mosley's brilliantly conceived and efficiently structured novel about Oxford University and environs, is a prose poem about marriage and infidelity, as well as the relationship between writing and existence, imagination and action. It is a study of the games academics play both with their students and with themselves, on campus and off, in bed or on the cricket fields or baronial halls of the landed gentry. By probing the mind of one philosopher-don, Stephen, who has second thoughts about what constitutes an "accident," Mosley gives us an unforgettable view of life at the top or tip of the academic heights, in addition to a moving story of love and betrayal.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature, 20th Century, Literary Fiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

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

[Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book opens with a an accident. A car overturned on its side. The man rushing to the car knows of the man dead the woman alive. What is unclear is who was driving. Events need to be uncorroborated. Facts dissembled and fogged. Least of importance is medical attention. There are possibilities of significant complications, inclusions and exclusions repercussions. These incidents do not occur to a man who has ordered his life so feelings do not exist, accidents do not happen. If they exist remoteness will dapple them into invisibility. An Oxford Don does not enslave himself to such possibilities. His only danger is one of time. The passage viewed by the stultified stratification of the other Dons, his muted future.

The opening roars of plot. How can this be after reading Mosley's, Impossible Object? Perhaps written earlier and prompted, driven by a publisher? Although the accident and potential consequences hover over the narrative, this is not about plot-how could I accuse you Mosley-but a book about time.

A narrator makes his way intellectually through the story, and himself. A Philosopher questioning the value of Philosophy and the existence of identity separate from the impending effects of environment, experience, the desire to develop a personality, to be a character in the ongoing charade of the story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Spoken in equivalent tones about a mind careful in observing itself being a mind, always steadying a rake, parsing.
Short crafted sentences do not connect consecutively. Landlocked they refer to different points in time in the narrative. There is a pattern with certain variations. Like a jigsaw puzzle but more frequently it does silently snap together. There are sudden revelatory snaps which knocks the book out of the reader's hand. Not surprising it falls open to where it was left.There is nothing mechanistic. Mosley knows what he is about and up to in this style that takes the reader experientially through the absence of a present into the rooted and unrooted images of the past and a clouded future rising in its uncontrolled possibilities.

The jigsaw structure recedes and flares so graduated and finely tuned it purrs into action as events in the narrative dictate. This is Mosley's world, his brushstroke finely wrought. The reader becomes witness to the confluence of form, style, story, before knowing they are witnessing heights of art born of talent but perfected with years of craft relearned over and again into something uniquely fitted between mind and imagination.

With the luster of love worn off with daily life and time passed the Philosopher is left with a real person, a real woman. She is no longer an object as in their youth for his pleasures, fantasies, longings. What is he to do with Rosalind? He cannot move beyond the webbed restraints of his own mind, cannot even be in touch with himself how can he love his wife. She is pregnant. Almost miscarried. Bedridden now she is staying with her mother in another town. This is no longer about romantic obsessions played out by his students, his aging writer friend. It is a flesh and blood person. It is about life. Within it contains a human body ripe with blood and tissue, organs, spit, tears. He has come to the crossroads. In a position of power as a Don he can have dalliances with his students, enjoyable ones. But what of this woman he has been married to for years, running a fever, damp, and sweating? What is that thing over there? …Love? And what is that?

He lives free-associating about the past or the past imagined or future imagined. The accident serves as a major disruption in this gowned lifelong pursuit. The disruption swells alongside the car on its side as, THE ACCIDENT. How to fit it into the paradigm of a life's mould for survival? The day is just to do things to last it out. Time becomes compressed, packed into a suitcase. Future time shrinks, the present absent as always due to his inward distancing cutting off feelings and therefore experience. Even as talking he remains outside watching himself, commenting and evaluating. Living in a world prepared in each of its details, thought, convention, to stay a battle against feelings and the chaos that may then intrude. If he can make it into the present he might possible glimpse the existence of a future. The alternative is to comfort himself in the past, as the gray Dons at Oxford, finding a spot where time passes beneath the flooring, the stones and rocks, unseen. The younger generation may be passing him by and bringing a new unfamiliar world with them but he has been a corpse walking through his own generation, his own life,

What to do? Try to catch that fleeting moment that hits by ACCIDENT and has not yet moved from the thrill of a present moment uncoded into the scrambling words of the past scurrying to congeal experience in an orderly memory and system of waiting beliefs? This moment, accidental, is before words arrive, what happens when an unexpected note is played, surprises, riffs of jazz unrehearsed, their continued explosive images haunting away the past, insisting on the present.

Accident questions if the price paid for the disruption of an accident, living with that possibility, is worth that cost or may it be more economical to live within the prism of the past, its memories fading into amber sequels which can
be seen from a remote stillness.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Colin Pie is back with a brand new haircut. Do you like the lime-green streaks? My hairdresser reassured me it was “the exciting thing” (he made the inverted comma sign with his fingers to signify its misleading faddishness) in corporate Britain today. Alan Sugar apparently went for a Mohican last week, proving once again how out of date and redundant his empire is and how the BBC are basically his main employer. Some men can’t be tempted out the boardroom with a cattle prod. It’s sad. But for now I like my blonde and lime-green locks, despite the rumours that eyeball-to-navel piercings will be hot in June. Here’s hoping that doesn’t happen—I wear glasses and have diabetes.

1. MJ Nicholls Would Like. To say that he read this novel himself. He’s pleased because he only reads two novels per year, usually written by Dr. Seuss or his wife Nurse Seuss (retro sexism). He admired the narrative’s ‘shorthand’ style, written to flit from thought-to-thought without any clumsy prose padding, but he found this style occasionally repetitive and clunky, especially the overuse of similes (three sometimes in the same paragraph) and liberal use of poetic adjectives. The dialogue too was awkwardly tagged and seemed to hang off the page—the characters (women especially) appeared extremely blank and lifeless. The afterword makes a good case for this novel’s innovation but you get the feeling Dalkey have been overly kind to Nicholas Mosley.

2. Colin Pie’s Fashion Tips. For men: Vaseline all the chest hairs on the left side of your body so they’re pointing upwards. Repeat this on your right side, pointing downwards. This is real turn-on for girls with mental health problems. For women: Headscarves aren’t only for the Queen or East European immigrants pretending they’re still in their villages. The tighter the better. Tie a polka-dotted scarf around your head so your eyes bulge slightly from their sockets. This a real turn-on for male cartoonists. Be sure to catch my new three-part series on clothes made from bits of old cabbage found in bins.

3. Finally. This novel was turned into a film in 1967 with Dirk Bogarde as an Oxford philosophy professor. Yes, really. The novel feels like a sixties relic: crusty upper-middle-class intellectuals chastising the younger generation for their loose morals but totally taking part in all the bed-hopping larks themselves . . . the younger the better! Lettuce works too, in hats.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do I do this justice? In writing this review, it is quite probable that Accident by Nicholas Mosley will not sound as magnificent as it is. Bear with me. On the surface it tells the story of a Cambridge don wistfully entertaining adulterous thoughts towards one of his students amidst philosophic passive-aggressive dissection of the value of his marriage, life and achievements . Trite? Distasteful? Platitudinous and patriarchal rubbish? How then could such a phenomenal piece of work grow from this? For it is truly phenomenal.

Stylistically, Accident is like nothing I have ever read. It is literature buried in poetry. In what I can only describe as scattergun-esque prose, Mosley’s sentences and paragraphs achieve a startling verisimilitude of the main characters consciousness. We are there, in his mind, bombarded by fragments of thought, saturated in his memories: we know him. The writing is possibly the most powerful and masterful I’ve ever read. Every paragraph compelled me to immediately reread and consume the words more completely. Metaphors and similes so well chosen were like synapses between work and reader. His approach to dialogue (predominantly using said as opposed to synonyms) brought an ever greater tangibility to the work and perfectly complimented the rich passages of description which progressed the story.

If you are a fan of literature, I urge, compel, implore that you read this amazing amazing piece of writing. I feel Mosley should be better known or more widely appreciated. Suffice to say I’ve snapped up much of his work and look forward to exploring his talent further. I’m interested to see how I feel about his other books as I believe they aren’t written in the same style. I shall reserve judgement but feel what he did here was so groundbreaking, iconoclastic even, that it will be a travesty if he didn’t use it elsewhere . If you’ve read him, please share your thoughts, if not I hope I’ve sufficiently whetted your appetite to give him a shot. A big fat 5/5

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly exposes the private terror that we carefully try to mask behind the everyday routines and trifles in our lives. Mosley's extraordinary use of non sequiturs to illustrate feelings of alienation and confusion is original and shocking. A book that spits you back into life feeling sharp and alive.

[Melting Uncle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very many bold and surprising sentences in this experimental novel from England 1965, later republished by Dalkey Archive. Weird to think this was hitting the shops of the UK around the same time as the Beatles' Rubber Soul. Ostensibly this is about a car crash and the events leading up to it but main thing seems to be Nicholas Mosley's herky-jerky writing style wherein free association meets unreliable-ish semi-narrative. Nothing unrealistic ever happens but things stay off-kilter throughout by way of constantly interjected ramblings that apparently flow freely from the learned author. Stream-of-consciousness of not just the characters but apparently the author as well.

The overall feeling is a little bit like being drunk at an inconvenient time. A work of talent and intelligence that doesn't quite cohere narratively or emotionally as well as the other Mosley I've read, Impossible Object. Both books feature the same leapfrog spaced out writing style and similar themes of marriage, parenting, adultery, and death. But that one, published three years after Accident, built to a satisfying ending where I'm not even sure I remember how this ended though I finished it just over a week ago.

I didn't love every page of this but tip my hat to Mosley for developing an original style that shares a family resemblance with something like Ulysses by James Joyce but different enough to feel new and not-derivative. Also enjoyed the dialogue- everything is "he said", "I said", "she said"and then out of nowhere somebody unexpectedly yells or screams something. Overall a quick and enjoyable dip into the Dalkey Archive catalog... I wonder how the film adaptations of this and Impossible Object turned out...

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an obsessive short novel that opens with an accident. The narrator, Stephen Jervis - a don at Oxford, has come upon two of his students, Anna and William, who have just crashed their car. The story flashes back to the moment when Anna has just met Stephen, as he has become her Philosophy tutor. As a tutor in Philosophy Stephen seems conflicted. In order to hide from his emotions he focuses on his work. "The consolations of work are that you come from it tired at the end of a long day. A robot, with men working inside you. They pull levers; switch. You watch and move. At the end you have something to look forward to. You go home. To rest. The mechanism sleeps. The men open doors, windows. Look out into the air."(p 18)

In the first meeting with Anna he gives her a brief introduction to the nature of philosophy and how much she must learn about it - existence and persons. What makes a person an enduring entity? What is the real substance of existence and what is an "accident." In his discussion with her it comes to the point where "Now we've got a choice. Before it was Just accident."(p 31)
With this introductory moment we have the theme of the novel. There is the real and the accidents of our existence. These will be played out through the lives of Stephen and his wife Rosalind, lives that include infidelity and the games that Stephen plays with the lives of others; both his student Anna and, in London, Francesca. As he thinks about the events leading up to the accident he wonders: "At what point did the course of events go wrong?" He thinks, "An accident is different from reality."(p 61) But what is reality? Is it the truth or an accident? The novel provides questions, not answers.

The culmination of his affairs comes in the relation of various incidents to the accident of the title, one that is on more physical grounds and one where, another one of Stephen's students, a young man he really doesn't like, William, is killed. What role does Stephen play in all of this? Should he feel guilt or is he even guilty? During the course of the book Anna has exercised quite an influence not only on William, but on Stephen and his colleague, Charlie. And at the close of what has been a demonstration and a defense of free will, worrying about the questions of guilt versus responsibility, Stephen (and Charlie) are left to determine their own conduct. Mosley writes in a style that commands attention. It is allusive, controlled, and with ideas that are implicit. For those who love novels of ideas and their relation to human emotions this is a perfect short novel.

[Dave Morris · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Experimental", say many of the blurbs and reviews, and it is that. Possibly a little too Joycean for its own good, but then Mosley did have to live down an infamous dad so perhaps he thought that by pushing the envelope of literary style he'd distance himself from thuggish blackshirted reactionaries.

The story is quite simple, and the style makes rather more of it than it deserves. Yes, I get that it's really about the narrator's sense of guilt and his midlife crisis than it is about the actual accident that kicks off the book. But he's not an interesting or wily enough character to reel us in.

The movie has many excellent moments that I assumed were Pinter's -- "You're standing on his face!", or the awkward meeting with the TV people (I've been there) -- but they're all here in the novel, just a little lost amid Mosley's stream of barely-consciousness.

[Colin]

On the cover Pinter claimed it was a “brilliant...piece of work” so I picked it up which is surprising because I don’t very much like Pinter’s plays. The shared his emotional detachment and direct unadorned dialogue. Some funny bits.

[Bob Peru · Rating 4 out of 5]

philosophical/psychological twistednrss.

[Tim]

First book I've read from the venerable Nicholas Mosley, who's practically Dalkey Archive's flagship author. He writes in a (cliche alert) fragmented (sorry), choppy style--many of his sentences are there to add tone rather than simple description or exposition, e.g., totally at random, in a scene where the narrator visits an office, "We walked across the carpet, a man in striped trousers, thumbs in waistcoat, blind and brilliant. Balloons filled with water. Intestines of power. The unfledged eggs." The back cover drops the phrase "prose poetry" at one point, which in some senses isn't too far off the mark. (The back cover also drops the unfortunate phrase "efficiently structured"--whoa, an efficiently structured novel? Gimme!) Plot: a professor at Oxford recounts the events surrounding a fatal car accident involving two students, one of whom he was more or less attempting an affair with. Worth checking out. Oft-cited bonus fun facts: Harold Pinter wrote a screenplay based on this novel and Joseph Losey filmed it in 1967; Nicholas is the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, whose second marriage was performed at Joseph Goebbels's home and attended by Goebbels and Adolf Hitler.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonishing bit of writing. Of its time while nailing timeless truths in the Oxbridge hothouse.