Nicholas Mosley has long been regarded as one of the most innovative English writers of his generation. He has pursued his chosen course as a novelist with integrity, never being lured away by literary fashions. He has neither sought widespread popularity nor achieved it. It is surprising, however, that he has not attracted a great deal of academic attention in Britain because his complex and thought-provoking fiction lends itself to exegesis and interpretation. One reason for this relative neglect is that Mosley stands apart from the English mainstream. His interest in abstract ideas, his preoccupation with the relationship between words and things, and his experiments with form mark him as more Continental than English in his approach to the art of fiction. It is significant that the first important academic publication about his work was American—an issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted to him in...