God's Hazard

God’s Hazard, Nicholas Mosley, Dalkey Archive Press, 2009 (ISBN 978-1-56478-540-4)

A writer named Adam is writing a reinterpretation of the Genesis creation stories but his tale becomes intertwined with the story of his daughter and her friends leaving school and travelling to the conflict zones of the contemporary world. Myth becomes combined with history in the making and the reader is challenged to resolve questions of creation, responsibility and parenting.

Adam writes of God’s hazard being in setting his children free but then faces a hazard of his own as his daughter makes her way in the world. But who is actually hazarding what and who is telling whose story? Adam seems to write God’s story and that of his daughter Sophie but his own story is also being told and who is doing the telling? What choices, freedom and responsibility do each actually have?

Mosley’s novel places us, as readers, in the centre of these questions and gives us the responsibility for mediating between “God’s efforts to care for humans while leaving them free” and “humans’ rediscovery of their true need for God through darkness and disaster.” It may seem as though Mosley is seeking to tie us up in knots but it may also be that what he has written is a love-knot that “both binds and leaves you free.”

Accordingly and rightly, earlier reviewers have noted that everything in Mosley’s realm is double-edged and multidimensional and that his novels are both abstract and realistic. In a similar vein Mark C. Taylor has written of the way in which “some of the most creative contemporary painters and architects are seeking a third way that falls between abstraction and figuration.” In their work, “torn figures mark the trace of something else, something other that almost emerges in the crack of faulty images.” This other, he writes, “is neither being nor nonbeing, fullness nor void, immanent nor transcendent.” Taylor calls this “genealogy of otherness and difference based on the principle of creative juxtaposition”, altarity.

Nicholas Mosley is therefore the novelist, par excellence, of altarity and God’s Hazard, his latest effort at the truth of a Christian faith in free will.

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