Catastrophe Practice Book

Catastrophe Practice is a novel in the form of three plays with prefaces and a novella, in which six characters, or actors, try to find their ways through some catastrophe that is less in the world outside than in their minds. They feel that conventional ways of seeing things have become disastrous and instead try to put catastrophe theory into practice in order to break through to something different.
Mosley draws upon catastrophe theory to investigate the discontinuities in human personality and our tendency to progress suddenly rather than smoothly. That we do progress underlines the basic optimism of the book. In Catastrophe Practice characters (and author) try to move away from the tragic or comic models hitherto provided by literature into categories more suited to growth and life.
First published in England in 1979, this edition contains an introduction by John Banks, the leading authority on Mosley's fiction, as well as a new postscript by the author, who has made numerous revisions throughout.

"Switching perspective from one book to another, from one character to another, from a watchtower to a three-eyed sheep, from the Bible to a television flicker-switch, from the immediate to the eternal and back again, Nicholas Mosley is in the midst of constructing an answer as tricky and uneven, as holy, as powerful and as old-fashioned as prayer." (Craig Brown, Times Literary Supplement)

"Here is a book whose author clearly aspires to something other than mere entertainment. Given that the British are inclined to regard abstract theorising on the human condition as a kind of disease, Mr. Mosley had better resign himself to charges of pretentiousness—an intellectual vice which is tolerated in foreigners but abhorred in natives." (John Naughton, The Listener 6-28-78)

"Mosley is that rare bird: an English writer whose imagination is genuinely inspired by intellectual conundrums." (Robert Nye, The Guardian 6-28-79)

"The series of five fictions called 'Catastrophe Practice' may be one of the most important extended literary projects of this century, on a level with the multivolume universes created by Proust, Anthony Powell, Lawrence Durrell and John Updike." (Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune 4-30-89)

"Dalkey Archive has in the English author Nicholas Mosley a throwback, a modernist mastodon whose project for fiction surpasses in grandiosity that of any contemporary American writer I know." (Tom LeClair, Washington Post 4-30-89)

Library Journal

The three plays and one short novel that make up Catastrophe Practice show humans still fumbling about between two worlds--one dead, the other powerless to be born--that Arnold wrote about. Like Arnold, too, Mosley has great hopes for literature's role in bringing that new world to birth. His characters are all in a hopeful quest for an understanding of themselves and others. This understanding may not alter human nature but is surely a first, necessary step toward changing old behaviors that have brought us near destruction. The philosophy lesson is heavy here; each play has a preface, and the whole ends with a postscript, so the reader who might worry about not getting some absurdist non sequitur or Mosley's efforts to go beyond the limitations of language by using the obscurities of myth need not fear. Four books arose directly from Catastrophe Practice . One of them, Imago Bird , is now being presented in a slightly revised version of the one published in England in 1980. It is an attempt to show who the characters in the plays might be in real life. Thus, Bert, the highly intelligent 18-year-old narrator, is nephew to the prime minister of England. With the help of his psychoanalyst, he tries to make some sense out of the chaotic adult world of politicians, radicals, pop stars, and eccentric relatives that surrounds him. Mosley aims to show that beneath the seemingly real world of appearance is a world of interior experience that language fails adequately to express. Genuinely experimental but wittier and more readable than the plays.-- Laurence Hull, Cannon Memorial Lib., Concord, N.C.