A review by jimmylorunning
Impossible Object by Nicholas Mosley

5.0

I wanted to write you something impossible, like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started or a cube with a vertical line at the back overlapping a horizontal one in front. These cannot exist in three dimensions but can be drawn in two; by cutting out one dimension a fourth is created. The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended.

It's important to remember that writers are magicians. Their art always starts with deception. In this way, writing is closely related to love. In the last section of the book, the author--Mosley--who happens to be a master magician, weaves an allegory about a princess and a woodcutter. But the magician--Mosley--casts his spell over his tale and reveals them as the witch and magician they really were. Thus another romance starts with deception and ends in the deception of art. For we find out later--too late?--that the magician--woodcutter--and the witch--princess--are both on stage, performing a ridiculous tableau.

"What is the point of being a witch and a magician," said the magician, "if we cannot become something different?"

Meanwhile back in the "real"/main story, the female lover disagrees:

I knew that he always thought that life could be refashioned and go on, but I thought that it should not. There are some things for which one cannot be forgiven.

But the magician--Mosley, in this case--does believe in this refashioning. His mode of magicianship has always been this art of transformation--rabbits out of hats, if you will--the metaphor and the simile, and he has never been shy about either.

p16: She sat with her hands between her legs; like mimosa.

p14: She had a soft mouth which birds could peck crumbs off.

p215: Beyond the waves their heads kept appearing and disappearing like oil.

And he's written his novel around this heavy-handed sleight of hand: story after story, the interlocking mechanism is at first unclear--maybe a connection is made by a similar comparison of a face to Cleopatra's, or a mention of a seaside town. At first the pieces do not add up, like a jigsaw puzzle in which you have focused too much on one problematic piece. By the end, you see that all the pieces do indeed fit, but the problem is now that they fit in too well, like a staircase that has connected itself back to its origin, making a convincing but impossible whole.

"Nietzsche said that everything goes round and round ... He said that everything eternally recurs; or rather that we should act as if everything did." My wife said "Why?" ... I said "Because this is the only way in which life is bearable." My wife looked disinterested. I said "As if everything that we do were such that we were going to go on doing it for ever."

This is a theme in the book. The male idea of being able to repeat something over and over, and the female idea that some things cannot. Thus Mosley--magician-- repeats the age-old, almost impossible theme of love. Can it or can it not be repeated? Likewise can love be repeated or only the disposable actions of love. The idea of acting comes in often, artifice:

We had been sitting in the pub in London one day and I had asked--Then what is our point?--and he had said in his voice that suddenly became like an actor--To maintain ecstasy. (p. 208, emphasis mine)

And the idea of a point. If the point is ecstasy, then love is just artifice, like writing. A set of mirrors to trick ourselves into thinking we are constantly at its height:

What I did not like was that for him life seemed to depend on complexity and flux: and this was not quite real, it was stimulated.

This is a carefully constructed, cynically dosed conception of love, art, and war (if they are not the same thing) that may or may not have anything to do with reality. But I highly recommend you read it anyway.