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Overview
"An 18 year old boy visits the west coast of Ireland and finds the ruins of hermit's cells on an offshore island. After a year at university he returns to try to discover what the old hermits were looking for. Is it possible that human nature might evolve and change?"--BOOK JACKET.Synopsis
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 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.
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. (July 15) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.