The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Children of Darkness and Light by Nicholas Mosley
John Banks

Nicholas Mosley. Children of Darkness and Light. Secker & Warburg,1996. 241 pp. £15.99.

At 241 pages Children of Darkness and Light is an easier read than Mosley’s imposing 1990 Whitbread Prize winner Hopeful Monsters; however like almost all of Mosley’s work it poses serious problems philosophical. Lacking the narrative baggage of Monsters, its style is a bit more abstract, darting, witty—strongly reminiscent of Mosley’s earlier Imago Bird and Serpent. Harry, a canny middle-aged journalist—an easily recognizable semblance of earlier protagonists, or the author—is curious about the children in the former Yugoslavia and in Cumbria, England who were said to have had visions of the Virgin Mary. In the background there are his marriage in difficulty, his son on the brink of adolescence, Harry’s still insistent sexual monkey, and our real world of atrocities and nihilism; Harry wants to know how to care for them all: “So I went and wrote a piece about the wonderment of the children on the side of the hill; the ruthlessness of church and state authorities in their treatment of the children. I mangaged to make the harassment of the children seem vaguely sexual.” This is not straight cynicism but a reminder of what we know about ourselves. Mosley offers protagonists who are fully intelligent self-conscious searchers, in whom the reader might hopefully see his or her own consciousness (impressions, coils of thought, and vague wonderings) and toward whom it is impossible to be patronizing. As a quest for the renewing vision of children, Harry’s enquiry is a further exploration of one of Mosley’s earlier themes, that humans might learn to see themselves not as rigid, trapped characters, but as bits and pieces of light.

The behavior of these knowing children seems mysterious: they appear here or there unexpectedly, as though they were visiting from some other level of reality (as, of course, they are). Mosley’s journalist enters a story which is also a kind of experiment; like anyone, he is both actor and observer at the same time, necessarily part of the event he reports. We are perpetually at the horizon of an unformed world and undecided events; what, then, is the effect of our knowing that it is our own brains which configure our world? The model for Harry’s search is in those experiments on the puzzling behavior of light quanta, in which scientists are in effect trying to see their means of seeing and thinking. Mosley has not overdone the science—this is not pop philosophy exploiting “quantum mysteries”—but the paradoxes of quantum physics are the theoretical scaffolding behind Harry’s respect and tolerance for the mysteries he encounters. There are more than literary grounds for likening children to particles of light, and, to honor what is obviously Mosley’s hope, the recognition of this might indeed help spark some veneration for their unknown potentialities. For humans, he asks, might there not be some responsibility to behave like gods?

Clearly Mosley demands much of his readers, and Children is not for those who would prefer to keep their reality unconvoluted, to believe, perhaps, that Harry’s eventual encounter with the Virgin Mary either is or is not genuine. The atmosphere is right: we are suspended in an experiment in progress. [John Banks]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Children of Darkness and Light by Nicholas Mosley John Banks Nicholas Mosley. Children of Darkness and Light. Secker & Warburg,1996. 241 pp. £15.99. At 241 pages Children of Darkness and Light is an easier read than Mosley’s imposing 1990 Whitbread Prize winner Hopeful Monsters; however like almost all of Mosley’s work it poses serious problems philosophical. Lacking the narrative baggage of Monsters, its style is a bit more abstract, darting, witty—strongly reminiscent of Mosley’s earlier Imago Bird and Serpent. Harry, a canny middle-aged journalist—an easily recognizable semblance of earlier protagonists, or the author—is curious about the children in the former Yugoslavia and in Cumbria, England who were said to have had visions of the Virgin Mary. In the background there are his marriage in difficulty, his son on the brink of adolescence, Harry’s still insistent sexual monkey, and our real world of atrocities and nihilism; Harry wants to know how to care for them all: “So I went and wrote a piece about the wonderment of the children on the side of the hill; the ruthlessness of church and state authorities in their treatment of the children. I mangaged to make the harassment of the children seem vaguely sexual.” This is not straight cynicism but a reminder of what we know about ourselves. Mosley offers protagonists who are fully intelligent self-conscious searchers, in whom the reader might hopefully see his or her own consciousness (impressions, coils of thought, and vague wonderings) and toward whom it is impossible to be patronizing. As a quest for the renewing vision of children, Harry’s enquiry is a further exploration of one of Mosley’s earlier themes, that humans might learn to see themselves not as rigid, trapped characters, but as bits and pieces of light. The behavior of these knowing children seems mysterious: they appear here or there unexpectedly, as though they were visiting from some other level of reality (as, of course, they are). Mosley’s journalist enters a story which is also a kind of experiment; like anyone, he is both actor and observer at the same time, necessarily part of the event he reports. We are perpetually at the horizon of an unformed world and undecided events; what, then, is the effect of our knowing that it is our own brains which configure our world? The model for Harry’s search is in those experiments on the puzzling behavior of light quanta, in which scientists are in effect trying to see their means of seeing and thinking. Mosley has not overdone the science—this is not pop philosophy exploiting “quantum mysteries”—but the paradoxes of quantum physics are the theoretical scaffolding behind Harry’s respect and tolerance for the mysteries he encounters. There are more than literary grounds for likening children to particles of light, and, to honor what is obviously Mosley’s hope, the recognition of this might indeed help spark some veneration for their unknown potentialities. For humans, he asks, might there not be some responsibility to behave like gods? Clearly Mosley demands much of his readers, and Children is not for those who would prefer to keep their reality unconvoluted, to believe, perhaps, that Harry’s eventual encounter with the Virgin Mary either is or is not genuine. The atmosphere is right: we are suspended in an experiment in progress. [John Banks]

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