I hope that what follows will not only help students to read this long and complicated book attentively but also introduce some specific issues that will help you to think about it in a productive fashion. What follows, though long, is not a tract intended to be either prescriptive or preemptive.

One general initial query (which also appears on the syllabus). Mosley's father, Sir Oswald Mosley, was the leader of Britain's fascists in the 1930s (and, if my memory serves, did time during the War despite his class origins--upper, need I add?). The family had notorious right-wing, fascist, and outright Nazi connections (as well as connections, by the way, in the Communist Party, too, in part through its involvements with the equally complicated Mitford family). Does this knowledge affect your reading of the son's book and his treatment in it of Jews, Nazis, and Communists? if so, how does it affect your reading? and, if so once again, should it affect your reading?

Threads that work their way through Mosley's book and to which you will want to pay attention as you read it include, centrally, a focus on three "experiments" of the twentieth century:

1. nuclear physics;
2. Germany (Nazism);
3. Russia (Communism).

Specific verbal threads--recurrent words or images--include (in no particular order and with no claim to comprehensiveness):

• angels
• patterns
• particles (and the ways they hit and bounce off one another)
• experiments (of course!)
• "hopeful monsters"

A related theme (as mentioned above): Max is involved (originally through his father; then through his own early experiment with the salamanders; and then through his "digression" into the subject) not only with physics but also with biology. What are the relevance and significance of this aspect of his character? The same sorts of questions (relevance? significance?) need to be asked about both Eleanor's anthropological and her psychological work. Max and Eleanor's "digressions" both raise important issues for the novel.

In shorthand, here are some additional points to worry:

1. the book's density of language;
2. its rootedness in many of the traditions of "high literary modernism," with some borrowings from "postmodernism," especially the latter's uncertainty of perspective, location, and point of view.

Readings that follow some of the verbal and thematic threads highlighted above (or others, as you find them) should help to clarify or at least to focus your sense and understanding of this long and dense work.

So too will attention to the book's many and various DETAILS, and the effort to juggle them (or at least to keep them in mind) over long periods of time in the book. One example: the "incest"--is it incest?--that Max and his mother engage in (p. 78) and which is referred to throughout the book, though briefly and on widely scattered pages. What is this stuff doing here?

So too (again) will your effort to keep things straight (clear), where possible--alongside your awareness that it may not always be possible to do so without a lot of knowledge of twentieth-century history. (But the "incest" is hard to keep clear with or without a knowledge of twentieth-century history; this is not an effort that will always work.)

Some examples (aside from the "incest") where details and keeping things straight matter--and can nonetheless be very difficult to keep straight:

1. The Spanish fascists--the Falangists--wore blue, a detail which makes them identifiable in the novel. But who still "remembers" (indeed, did any of you ever know) such details?
2. In the scenes after Eleanor reaches Spain in the boat from Morocco, where the Spanish Civil War began (did anyone know that? or catch the resonance when she reached Melilla after crossing the Sahara and watched the execution of a soldier [executed for what? "Loyalism"? (what's a Loyalist"?) betraying the date of the projected insurrection?]), who wears the khaki or the white or the fez-festooned uniforms? In other words, what sides are found in which uniforms? do we know? do we need to know?
3. Is the odd relationship--is it "love"? (and, if so, whose?)--between Eleanor and Walburga a relationship "outside" Mosley's sense of "history" and purely a novelistic device for examining (or portraying) character? or does it rely on our sense (if we have read the "right books") of the undercurrent of "aberrant sexuality" that some historians detect, rightly or wrongly, in Nazism?
4. Relatedly: there is a consistent attention to homosexuality in the novel. Why?

One more overarching query is one you won't be able to answer until you've got through the entire novel. Here goes: the book's title refers to "hopeful" monsters. Is this novel merely depressing (as opposed, let us say, to "depressingly long")? grim? "negative"? Or has it any air about it of optimism, faith in the future, faith in "progress" (gasp!)? What, to put this in a slightly different way, is the novel's tone? What is its attitude towards physics? towards "the Bomb"?

And finally some additional questions to keep in mind as you reach the end of the book:

1. So what are the book's "hopeful monsters"? (or who are they?) and what makes them "hopeful"? Do you feel hopeful as a result of meeting them?
2. How atypical of the novel as a whole is its last chapter? What is that chapter doing here? does it work? has it a function?
3. Mosley makes nuclear physics not a separate but an integral part of his representation of "main currents in twentieth-century history"; yet it remains at once both "integral" and a "separable strand" in the lives of his protagonists, especially Max. Max moves back and forth between physics, biology, philosophy, and the various women who, and adventures that, occupy the rest of his copious spare time. Especially Max, but not Max only. For Franz, for Hans, for Eleanor, for the various spies, nuclear physics is part of what they do but not the whole of what they do. How does this sense of twentieth-century physics seem to you to work? Does it seem a reasonable way to portray the importance of nuclear physics to the culture and politics of our century?
4. Hopeful Monsters is not exactly a "Manhattan Project novel"; yet the Project and, of course, the Bomb ("the Bomb") it produced are centrally important to Mosley's book. What is Mosley's attitude towards the bomb? or, another way: what are the book's politics?

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Last update: 26 November 1997

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