Jason is a scriptwriter working on a film about Masada—the fortress where a thousand Jews killed themselves rather than be taken prisoner by the Romans in A.D. 73. Jason doubts that a film both honest and popular on such a subject can be made. The story of Serpent takes place on the airplane taking a party of VIP film people to Israel. The dispute about the film—concerning the nature of loyalty, of sacrifice for the good of society—runs parallel with an actual drama that unfolds on the plane: between Jason, his wife Lilia, a man she befriends (who may or may not be a hijacker), and the show-business people in first class. A climax is reached in which the conflicts on the plane, Jason's fanciful ideas for a script on Masada, memories of his past life, and a contemporary crisis in Israel all seem to run parallel and even nudge one another—at least in imagination. The plane comes down to earth . . .
This is the third novel in Mosley's acclaimed Catastrophe Practice series.
"Engrossing, interesting, highly complex, at times suddenly flat, Serpent remains part of a serious inquiry into complex issues of art and life; and we don't get enough of this in the often light world of the contemporary novel." (Malcolm Bradbury, Vogue)
"As in a number of his books, Mosley explores the ways in which conventions, whether social, moral, or artistic, can be a form of imprisonment, inhibiting responses, closing the doors of perception instead of opening them. . . . Serpent is very much about the responsibility entailed by this awakening, and about how life can be made a 'successfully going concern.'" (Times Literary Supplement)
"Like so much of Mosley's recent fiction, the script aims at 'seeing things in two ways at once.' The extracts from it that we are shown are full of intellectual trampolining, jugglings with myth, tightrope-walkings between farce and grimness, tonal somersaults. . . . Like everything else in Serpent, they derive from a willingness to take risks in emulating the dartingly various nature of thought and response. Mosley's novel tackles intelligently the difficulty of communicating the complex." (The Listener 12-10-81)
"Serpent is an engrossing, if not an explosively original book." (Boston Review 12-89)
"Successful fictional meditation on the necessity of role-playing. . . . An exhilarating high-modernist novel of ideas." (Kirkus Reviews 11-15-89)
