[A lire 113] • Moo Pak

'This is the istry of Moo Pak,' writes a schoolboy, struggling with his

assignment as he sits in the Great Hall of Moor Park, now a secondary school.

Once the home of Sir William Temple, here Swift wrote the Tale of the Tub and

tutored the nine-year-old Stella. Later the building was a lunatic asylum, a

college of theology, a code-breaking centre (during World War II), and an

institute for the study of primate behaviour.

So Jack Toledano, a Sephardic Jew from Egypt and ex-University lecturer in

English, tells his friend Damien Anderson in the course of innumerable walks

through the parks and waterways of London during the 1980s. Toledano is

writing a history of Moor Park which is also a history of himself and his

times, of the Jews and the English. Moo Pak unfolds that history in an

eloquent and breathless sweep, as Anderson strives to record what Toledano

says and what he knows of his friend, a sweep that takes in man's relation to

the great apes, the nature of language, Classicism and Romanticism, Swift,

Pope, madness, despair and death.

Moo Pak is a palimpsest not only of themes that have preoccupied Gabriel

Josipovici in the past twenty-five years but of our civilisation itself, its

dreams, achievements and repressions. And it is a simple, moving tale of

friendship and its aftermath.