Imago Bird Book

This vivid and strikingly witty novel examines the contradictions between the public face and the private experience. Nephew to the prime minister of England, eighteen-year-old Bert tries to make sense of the grown-up world around him, a colorful crowd of television personalities, politicians, Young Trotskyites, pop stars, and eccentric relatives. With the help of his laconic psychoanalyst, Bert questions the relation between exterior and interior reality, while Mosley himself questions art's ability to convey these different realities. Both Bert and Mosley triumph over these challenges by the end of this engaging and innovative novel, part of the series of interlocking novels concerning the fortunes of the six protagonists of Mosley's Catastrophe Practice.

"[A]n inventive, wickedly amusing coming-of-age novel. . . . [Mosley] shapes a narrative the way a nuclear physicist might track a quantum experiment: in thousands of discrete moments, recording his character's immediate sense impressions, the gap between what they speak and what is churning within." (Publishers Weekly 1-13-89)

"Mosley gets all of it—psychoanalysis, youthful sex, and politics—exactly and hilariously right. He is ingenious and cunning. . . . Anybody who is serious about the state of English fiction should applaud Nicholas Mosley's audacity—his skill is unquestionable." (Frank Rudman, Spectator)

"Mosley has a genuinely original view of the world, making Imago Bird the most interesting novel I have read for some time." (Thomas Hinde, Sunday Telegraph 9-14-80)

"Mosley has started one of the very few genuinely experimental projects in modern English writing; whole others cling to pessimism as if it is the artist's passport, he strives to communicate the real presence of optimism, its subtlety, its secrecy, its apparent incompatibility with the language." (Craig Brown, Times Literary Supplement 9-19-80)

"There is a sharp, elliptical quality about Nicholas Mosley's writing that constantly checks the flow of words and prevents you letting the story engulf you. The plot of Imago Bird is simple enough: its the angular telling that gives it its piercing, metallic quality." (Martyn Goff, Daily Telegraph 9-18-80)