Hopeful Monsters: A Novel

At the center of this pyrotechnically accomplished novel of ideas--winner of the Whitbread Award--are Max and Eleanor, who meet at an orgiastic clash of Nazi and communist youth in Weimar Germany. Their ensuing love affair takes them across landscapes that range from Stalin's Russia to Los Alamos on the eve of the atomic age and into the orbit of such extraordinary characters as Albert Einstein.

Meeting at a confrontation between Nazi and communist youth on the streets of Weimar Germany, Max and Eleanor begin a love affair that takes them from Stalin's Russia to Los Alamos on the eve of the atomic age.

Publishers Weekly

Hopeful monsters? ``They are the things born perhaps slightly before their time; when it's not known if the environment is quite ready for them,'' explains Max Ackermann, the Cambridge-born physicist whose exchange of letters and shared reminiscences with Eleanor Anders make up this huge, intellectual Baedeker of a novel. Mosley ( Catastrophe Practice ) takes as his subject nothing less than the curve of social and scientific thought in the 20th century and traces its path against a backdrop of political upheaval and madness. The main characters are ideally positioned to enlighten these complex issues: Max is the son of a stern, classical biologist and a Bloomsbury psychologist; Eleanor's parents are a gentle physicist father and a communist mother. Mosley's meditations on (and portraits of) Lysenko, Einstein, Wittgenstein, Brecht and others are brilliantly turned and, as Eleanor says of a Brecht play, ``representative of something happening and being demonstrated at the same time.'' The magical lurks beneath the relentless grind of the real throughout the book: a recurring theme has Max wandering into blasted landscapes where disfigured, enchanted children perform mysterious rituals. Max and the half-Jewish Eleanor maintain an irony-clad love affair from their first meeting in 1929 ; their intellectual and emotional journeys are sustained by the ambiguities of the modern era--the pursuit of the bomb for peaceful ends, which brings the couple to New Mexico, for example. Mosley's book is a perfectly realized exposition of notions integral to the Western mind. The Magic Mountain is cited at a key juncture, and it is apt: this novel, winner of the 1990 Whitbread Award, is equal to Mann's in grandeur of theme. (Nov.)

Born in 1923, Nicholas Mosley is married and has five children, and lives in London. Hopeful Monsters won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award (1990).