Lacklustre Fiction

There are two sides to Kate Mosse: the aesthetic and the artistic. Aesthetically exquisite, the alluring Ms Mosse was a popular attraction at the recent Durham Books Festival.

Elegantly dressed, Mosse’s sculpted features were framed by golden locks modestly pulled up into a ponytail which bounced pendulously as she gesticulated to emphasise her points. These points, made in a confident, polished and ever so slightly seductive if not suggestive voice, held the audience in a state of evident anticipation and frequent amusement. Ms Mosse’s performance was rendered more formidable for the calm and patient way she handled the fawning introduction and gushing questions from the interviewer which were enough to drench the entire audience. This engaging and charming personality no doubt significantly lengthened the queue to her book signing which almost snaked its way out of the Gala Theatre.

On reading her books however, the superlatives cease.

Starting at the end of the book is perhaps the best way to enjoy Ms Mosse’s works although it still provokes considerable pain. To describe her endings as facile could misleadingly indicate that the rest of her books are of a superior quality. Her magnum opus Labyrinth ends thus, “in the distance, a white moon is rising in the speckled sky, promising another fine day tomorrow.” This ending requires no further comment except that after 525 pages it cannot come soon enough. A second comment refers to Mosse’s physical descriptions of her heroines. Her best known heroine Alice, “stands up and stretches her slim legs, lightly tanned by the sun.” Aside from the dubious grammar inexcusably employed on the first page of her novel, Mosse’s commitment to attractive heroines is reiterated as she goes on to laud Alice’s Lolita-esque features which are those of a girl “little more than a teenager.” Her attire of “cut-off denim shorts, tight white sleeveless T-shirt and cap” for an archaeological dig is implausible and makes a mockery of the “years” of research Mosse repeatedly professes to have done.

Thematic content is clearly another area where Ms Mosse struggles to attain the standard necessary to classify her as a novelist of any merit. Her statement that “History is words carved on stone so that we should remember”, is certainly an independent and unconventional approach to the discipline. However, her judgement at the Durham Books Festival that “WWI is a clean issue because the rights and wrongs are so clear” is unpardonable. Her failure to explain what exactly the rights and wrongs of WWI are excuses her from further embarrassment and also excludes her books from any kind of claim to the historical novel genre. This one statement taken in isolation, raises questions about her understanding of historical controversy, one of the basic foundations of the discipline.

Ms Mosse’s interesting relationship with controversy and the supernatural manifests itself in two separate cringeworthy extracts for which her editor must surely take some share of the blame. “Alice understands, as Alais did, that the real Grail lies in the love handed down from generation to generation, the words spoken by father to son, mother to daughter.” This is followed by, “a flash of understanding went through Alice. The Grail belonged to all faiths and none. Christian, Jew, Moslem. Five guardians, chosen for their character, their deeds, not their bloodline. All were equal.” Seemingly aimed at the masochistic reader, writing of this quality is better classified as typing, an author whose reputation rests on such a work should perhaps be reclassified as a clerk.

Cyril Connolly’s decree that it is “better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self” was intended as a maxim for talented writers selling their pens to the highest bidder. Sadly, Ms Mosse has yet to prove herself as a writer let alone demonstrate her talent. With the recent publication of The Winter Ghosts it remains to be seen whether Ms Mosse can elevate her artistic attraction to that of her aesthetic appeal.