The Hesperides Tree (British Literature Series) [Paperback]

Nicholas Mosley (Author)

Book Description

Series: British Literature Series | Publication Date: June 2001

-- One of Nicholas Mosley's most compelling and provocative novels, The Hesperides Tree draws on the themes explored in his Catastrophe Practice Series -- the importance of myth and coincidence in our lives. A young man frustrated by the inability of either of his two chosen disciplines -- biology and English -- to articulate a complete view of the world leaves his university and embarks upon a quest to find the girl he fell in love with years before, and to understand the relationship among things. His journey leads him to a deserted island -- home to a species of rapidly evolving birds -- that may be the mythical Garden of the Hesperides, where the Tree of Life is thought to be.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Mosley (Hopeful Monster) is known as a novelist of ideas, and his latest effort takes on evolution, chance, God and the Internet. An unnamed young man, 18 at the start of the novel, goes in 1998 with his father, a director of TV documentaries, and his mother (both unnamed) to a cottage on the west coast of Ireland. His father is there to verify a report that there's been some rapid evolutionary change among birds on the coast. His mother owns the cottage, which they discover is being used by the locals, perhaps for smuggling guns. The young man even witnesses a gun battle, presumably between the smugglers. Returning to England, he travels to Oxford, where he meets Edward Constantine, whose father, the wealthy Connie Constantine, has a mysterious interest in the unnamed boy; it's revealed that Connie had an affair with the boy's mother. Edward is obsessed by computers; he wants to bring down the Internet. The boy meets a feminist, Christina, and impregnates her, then goes back off to the cottage in search of whatever anchoritic delights might await him there. What he finds, however, is more romance and swashbuckling adventure. While the boy is presented as a contemporary teenager, Mosley has instilled in him the soul of some diffident Edwardian youth, rendering his thoughts in an affected style that verges on the ludicrous, as in: "I put my arm round Julie and pulled her towards me. I thought We are like the clapper and the dome of a bell, reverberations from which go off to assist sailors." Such prose doesn't teeter on the edge of parody it demands it.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Set in the late 1990s, Whitbread Award winner Mosely's (Children of Darkness and Light) new novel is the unusual and original coming-of-age tale of an unnamed 18-year-old narrator. The novel is built around a series of fantastic coincidences, inadequately explained by the narrator's scientific and humanistic education, that seem part of the very fabric of life. At college he befriends Edward, the son of a software magnate his mother had been involved with years before. On a trip to Ireland, he briefly spies a beautiful young girl. Years later he becomes involved with her, a relationship that leads to an island off the Irish coast once inhabited by monks and now populated with an endangered species of bird, symbolic guardians of the Tree of life, possibly located there. A novel of ideas in the best sense, this is a provocative meditation on the roles of chance, fate, and myth in our lives. For larger libraries. Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 311 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr (June 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564782670
• ISBN-13: 978-1564782670
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,768,949 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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