Hopeful Monsters

Hopeful Monsters This is simply the worst novel I have ever read. The writing style is choppy, the dialogue is banal and the characters are two dimensional.This may be a love story, but there is absolutely no chemistry between the "lovers"-no good love scene, no indication of attraction, and no details to flesh these characters out. Read a good love story with ideas and content, like the Alexandria Quartet. Ted Ehrlich

In 1991, Nicholas Mosley resigned from the judging panel for England's prestigious Booker Prize when none of his choices made the shortlist. Writing about the affair in The Times of London, Mosley related that all of his choices were rejected because they were 'novels of ideas, or novels in which characters were subservient to ideas.' He went on to opine, in a statement that seems to apply as much to his Whitbread Prize-winning novel 'Hopeful Monsters' as to his view of his Booker choices: 'My point was that humans were beings who did have ideas, who were often influenced by ideas, to whom ideas were important. If they were not, then there was some lack in being human.''Hopeful Monsters' is a novel where character development is subservient to ideas, where narrative action takes place against big historical events. While it ostensibly tells the story of a life-long romantic relationship between Max Ackerman, an English physicist, and Eleanor Anders, a German-Jewish anthropologist, the romance is as much a vehicle for the promulgation and exploration of ideas as it is a tale of a man and a woman in the twentieth century.'Hopeful Monsters' begins at the end of World War I. Max is ten years old and lives outside Cambridge, England. His father is a biologist who specializes in genetic inheritance and his mother is a woman of seeming artistic interests who had been 'brought up on the fringes of what was even then known as the Bloomsbury Group.' His parents have had long ties to the Cambridge University community. Eleanor, too, lives in an intellectual milieu, one in which ideas predominate. Eleanor lives in Berlin, where her mother is a Marxist and follower of Rosa Luxemburg and her father is a lecturer in philosophy. From such beginnings, novels of ideas are made!From this starting point, 'Hopeful Monsters' narrates the story of Max and Eleanor through the rise of Nazism in Germany, the post-Lenin rise to power of Joseph Stalin, the Spanish Civil War, and the development of the Atomic Bomb. It does this while, all the time, interweaving Darwinism (and its Lamarckian heresy), Marxism, quantum physics and the uncertainty principle, Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian archetypes, and even suggestions of Jewish mysticism. It is a story that runs from 1918 until the 1970s and continually challenges the reader to think about the ideas, the opinions, the intellectual sensibilities and feelings of Max, Eleanor and the books other characters. It is a magnificent and challenging novel of ideas, a novel that deservedly won the Whitbread Prize in 1990.If 'Hopeful Monsters' has any shortcomings, it is that ideas and historical events predominate at the expense of character development. It also suffers, at times, from a somewhat turgid prose style. In particular, Mosley is fond of introducing statements by Eleanor and Max with the clauses 'I said' and 'You said'. It is a construction that helps the reader follow long spoken exchanges, but gets a bit tedious. Mosley also tends to write sentences as statements with a question mark at the end. This, too, can be annoying, suggesting a rising inflection by the speaker that can hardly be the intent. These are, however, relatively minor failings in a novel which is majestic in the breadth and depth of its intellectual suggestiveness, a really big modern novel that deserves to be more widely read.

This author is the son of Sir Oswald Mosley, "The Leader" of the British Union of Fascists, and this novel is largely about the rise of fascism and other forms of totalitarianism in the 1920s and 30, so one might think he would bring an exceptional knowledge and experience to it. But, although the novel evokes the period vividly at times, it ends by being annoyingly distanced from its subject matter. Yes, it is a "novel of ideas" but ideas need to be based on knowledge and experience to work in imaginative literature.For example, evolutionary theory is a basic part of the novel's intellectual structure-- "hopeful monsters" as in the Lamarckian idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics and in eugenic ideas of improving the human race. But the author seems to have little knowledge or experience of actual biology-- he doesn't seem to know about plants and animals as part of natural ecosystems, so his evolutionary ideas are pretty thin although dressed up in graceful prose.The main characters, Max and Elena, are meant to be "hopeful monsters" in a way-- a new kind of human being. But they lack character-- their narrative voices in alternating chapters have an identical whimsical naivete, so they seem like the Bobbsey Twins as Ubermenschen. And of course the whole idea of civilization creating superior human beings is a bit totalitarian, although the author doesn't mean it to be.His memoir about his father is much more interesting than this one, because he brings more knowledge to it. It made a good TV series, with Jonathan Cake doing a lively, irreverent, portrayal of "The Leader." A TV series of Hopeful Monsters would be even more interminably boring than The English Patient (which its story resembles).

This is the finest dramatizationn of the political and ideological factionalism of inter- War and World War II era Europe imaginable. From the author of source materials and scripts for three Joseph Lossey films. Biographer of infamous Oswald Mosely, but not remotely fascistic. The depth and high dramatic punch of BERLIN ALEXANDERPLATZ, DR. FAUSTUS and THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES, if not quite as stylistically transporting as Mann and Musil. Enthralling for readers with some general sense of Marxian, fascist and liberal, ideologies and parallel political factions. Far contorted than any other English language effort, say Hughes' FOX IN THE ATTIC or Deighton's WINTER.

This is a remarkable book written by a man whose very name would instil caution in a reader. As his father was insensitive, so Nicholas feels and conveys every mood of his characters in poignant style. He is a wonderful discovery - and too little known.

It was a very contrived story and the characters were not rounded. If a reader wishes to understand scientific theories, he should read original work and scientific commentaries.

Difficult to read but worth the effort.