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. 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.

Genres: Fiction, British Literature

192 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."