[In the following review, Cheyette offers a generally positive assessment of Moo Pak.]

The title of Gabriel Josipovici's 11th novel [Moo Pak] is a child's rendition of Moor Park, now a secondary school, where Jonathan Swift originally wrote A Tale of a Tub. While in residence at Moor Park, Swift met the eight-year-old Esther Johnson, known as Stella, who eventually became the love of his life. The subsequent history of Moor Park—as a lunatic asylum or an institute for research into primates—is alluded to throughout the novel.

But this work is not about Moor Park in any straightforward sense. The house is used as an extended metaphor for that which combines the unkept or natural world of the “moor” with the cultivated “parks” of the novel's London setting. Josipovici is fascinated by Swift precisely because his writing holds in tension a passionate intensity with a formal coolness. This fundamental struggle is enthrallingly re-enacted in Moo Pak.

Swift's conflicted sensibility feeds into the creative desperation of Jack Toledano. For much of the novel, we simply hear Toledano's cri de coeur. His voice is so rich that the need for a well-crafted plot seems artificial. But, as he grows increasingly melancholy and misanthropic, the many straws at which he clutches give the novel its coherence.

On one level, Toledano is Josipovici in extremis. Both are Sephardi Jews, who came to England from colonial Egypt (via war-time France) and taught literature at university level. It would also be hard to separate, from Josipovici's criticism, Toledano's sparkling readings of, say, Dante or Homer and the Hebrew bible. Yet what Toledano says has the illusory naturalness of the spoken word.

Toledano's pungent, devastating opinions can be thought of as hot-blooded versions of Josipovici's own cultural criticism: on the dire state of modern English culture, the “obscenity” of much writing on the Holocaust, or the manifold iniquities of puritanical Anglo-American academics. Not that this novel is, in any facile way, autobiographical. For one thing, Toledano's voice is mediated throughout by his walking partner as they criss-cross London's parkways. This device gives Toledano free rein to fill the novel with his glorious insights into fiction and his acerbic attacks on contemporary society.

Complaining of his inability to escape from the horrors of the world, he states that “we cannot shut our ears and we cannot open our hearts, we have created things to which our organs have not had a chance to adapt.” Never before has the cliché of “compassion fatigue” been so succinctly dissected.

The novel is replete with such meaty aphorisms and they are an uncomfortable pleasure to read. But at the same time as this Swiftian offensive, Josipovici remains playful and detached. Toledano says: “A piece of fiction which consists of reminiscence or preaching can not stand up.” Unlike Josipovici, who has not fully retired from teaching, Toledano believes that the only way to “fight” is to “retreat into the fortress of ourselves and prepare for a long siege.”

Moo Pak gradually begins to move beyond a siege mentality. It enacts, instead, a series of Swiftian themes based on the history of Moor Park. These, in the end, become the large book that Toledano is supposed to be writing. The novel sweetly dramatises the perpetual struggle between the written word—the parklands—and that which can not be known in the dark “moors” of the imagination. That Toledano, who seems to have an opinion on everything, fails to speak on the one topic that obsesses him is left to the reader to contemplate in silence.