Accident

by Nicholas Mosley

"Accident," Nicholas Mosley's brilliantly conceived and efficiently structured novel about Oxford University and environs, is a prose poem about marriage and infidelity, as well as the relationship between writing and existence, imagination and action. It is a study of the games academics play both with their students and with themselves, on campus and off, in bed or on the cricket fields or baronial halls of the landed gentry. By probing the mind...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0916583112
• ISBN13: 9780916583118
• Release Date: November 1985
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 198 Pages
• Weight: 0.66 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

An enigmatic, resonant novel

A plot description of "Accident" might make it seem like a conventional mystery/thriller novel, and yet it is not that at all. It's not a thriller (though it is a sort of moral and metaphysical mystery) and it is certainly not conventional. Mosley's use of language is innovative without being obscure -- he uses the rhythms of his words, sentences, and sentence fragments both to create suspense and to force the reader to pay as much attention to what is not being said and thought as what is (it's no surprise that the book was made into a film with a script by Harold Pinter)."Accident" begins with a car accident. The narrator of the book, who we soon discover is a professor of philosophy at Oxford, lives near the accident site and is the first person on the scene. He discovers in the car a half-conscious woman and a dead man, both of whom are students of his. He carries the woman to his house, then calls the police. But he doesn't tell them about the woman.The book moves backwards in time from there, and we get to know who these characters are and their tangled relationships to each other. At the end, we return to the accident, now fully understanding all of the forces playing into the situation.The book is not quite 200 pages long, and yet its texture is so rich, its moral and philosophical questions so difficult, its language so perfect that it lives in the reader's (or, at least, this reader's) mind as books of twice its length do not.