title: Look at the Dark (Coleman Dowell British Literature)
author:  Nicholas Mosley 
description: Mosley won the Whitbread Prize for <I>Hopeful Monsters </I>(1990) and has written 25 other works of fiction and nonfiction centering on philosophical quandaries, political instabilities and religious impasses. This time out, an unnamed retired Oxford professor of anthropology and cultural studies has becomes a talk show fixture thanks to his inflammatory rhetoric: "Of course suicide bombers are the most disliked sort of terrorists, because then there are no defendants from whom lawyers can get fat fees." Visiting New York City for a series of television appearances in the wake of 9/11, he gets hit by a car and, lying in a morphine-induced stupor, envisions the women of his life, including first wife Valerie; current wife Valentina; the one-legged African woman with whom he slept while on his honeymoon; and a young Iranian woman, Nadia, whose own complicated and nebulous history is entangled with his philosophies on fidelity, sin and grace. The resulting narrative has an apocalyptic feel, but Mosley's observations on the power and limitations of human communication are thought provoking (though parallels between the Tower of Babel and two other towers are overdone), and his acerbic narrator never quite gives up hope. <I>(Mar.)</I> <BR>Copyright &copy; Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  # A Child in the Dark and a Foreign Father
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Henry Lawson
  
  
  
  
  
  NEW Year's Eve! A hot night in midsummer in the drought. It was so dark --
  
  
  with a smothering darkness -- that even the low loom of the scrub- covered
  
  
  ridges, close at hand across the creek, was not to be seen. The sky was not
  
  
  clouded for rain, but with drought haze and the smoke of distant bush fires.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Down the hard road to the crossing at Pipeclay Creek sounded the footsteps
  
  
  of a man. Not the crunching steps of an English labourer, clod-hopping
  
  
  contentedly home; these sounded more like the footsteps of one pacing
  
  
  steadily to and fro, and thinking steadily and hopelessly -- sorting out the
  
  
  past. Only the steps went on. A glimmer of white moleskin trousers and a
  
  
  suggestion of light-coloured tweed jacket, now and again, as if in the glimmer
  
  
  of a faint ghost light in the darkness.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  The road ran along by the foot 