Mosley won the Whitbread Prize for Hopeful Monsters
(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. (Mar.)
