Heavenly Bodies

By Martha Duffy

NATALIE/NATALIA by Nicholas Mosley. 316 pages. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. $6.95.

One first meets M.P. Tony Greville late at night. He is skipping along the sidewalk, keeping to the pavement lines like a child. It is not quite the beginning one would expect from Mosley, the author of Impossible Object, a difficult novel which has become a kind of sacred object among aspiring writers. But matters are soon set straight. Says Tony. "The skipping was in my mind, the lines and squares in the universe."

The reader has to be in literary training to follow Mosley's hopscotch course. He is one of a number of writers, the best of them Nabokov, whose subject is often the nature of creativity itself. What fictional furniture there is seems of secondary importance, to be moved around at will. Tony seems negligent and disillusioned. He is married to Elizabeth, whom he "likes," but his only real involvement is an obsessive affair with Natalia Jones, the wife of another M.P. On the face of it Natalia seems a routine bitch. Her jealousy, her suicide threats, her retreat to her husband when Tony becomes serious are all cliches.

"There was some achievement during the first half of my life," he reflects, "success, stability, family, money." Now in middle life, Tony craves more. He decides the new taboo subject, replacing sex, is treating life as if it had meaning. Tony dreams of selfdiscovery, of "waylaying myself like a bandit."

Needless to say, there are all sorts of potential ambushes. Already febrile, Tony is sent to a strife-torn African country, representing Britain there "as a hole might represent a bucket." During an interview with an imprisoned black hero, Tony mouths bromides about using prisons as universities. At a subsequent party he rides a bike into a swimming pool. After recuperating from a broken arm and a fragmented psyche, he goes back to England, formally leaves Elizabeth and politics.

Inevitably he returns to Natalia/Natalie who has "the sweetness [Natalia] and ravenousness [Natalie] of an angel." In thin disguise, Tony is really a writer and Natalie is his muse. Tony's demands on himself have no limit. He wants to find a way "through which paradoxes could be held." There are other goals. How to defeat the logic imposed by language. How to conquer the limitations on writing imposed by the fact that only a comparative solitary will write at all. As for the rest of humankind, why is it that "there is no place, except on a tightrope, where there is room for all"?

Eventually one wonders if there is not a little Flying Wallenda in Author Mosley--a lot of skill and daring and not a little wobble. The unsatisfied muse, Natalie, might point out that there are too many attenuated aperc,us here and too big an aesthetic load weighing on such a slight situation. But the sweet muse, Natalia, would smile upon a good writer trying to define and dramatize the mystery of creativity. In the end, Tony thinks, "If Natalia was sun and earth, I was gravity." It is a stunning metaphor for a writer's goal: the illusion that he controls, even for a euphoric moment, the attraction of heavenly bodies.

--Martha Duffy

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