Identity
In a 1987 profile in The Guardian, on the publication of The Case of Thomas N., Hugh Hebert singled out the identity issue. "Thomas N. never uses the word 'I', and that disappearance of the personal pronoun is also an important thread in Morley's essay on the Japanese language," Hebert noted of a theme common to Morley's first three books. "In the Japanese book, Morley wrote in the third person, calling his young Englishman Boon. In the Labyrinth suddenly, a third of the way through, turned into a first person narrative – Morley went back and wrote it all as 'I'. Thomas N. is a youth without qualities, a large zero in which the people around can write their own ideas."[12]
"Morley is an immigrant of the imagination" observed Richard Eder in his review of The Feast of Fools in The Los Angeles Times Book Review: "His cityscape, his celebrations, his meals, his very weather and noises are German. Yet his principal characters mount their national ladders into a universality that is sweetly particular."[13] Frank Kermode echoed Eder's notion in his tribute to Morley's Passage twelve years later: "A remarkable feat of imagination and sheer narrative energy. What Morley has achieved is the apotheosis of the picaro. The old style picaresque confined the hero to a single lifetime; Morley has burst free of such constraints and deals in centuries, with corresponding geographic advantages."[14]
Humanism
Informed by the specter of the post-war years and the era of division in Germany, the unnerving bleakness of certain of Morley's earlier books (the stark prison sequences of In the Labyrinth, for example, or the disturbingly ambiguous coda of The Case of Thomas N.) gives way, over the course of his body of work, to a more hopeful, even profoundly life-affirming vision of the nature of existence, as evidenced in his narrator's conjectural conclusions on cetacean physiology in Journey to the End of the Whale and on the cosmic implications of quantum mechanics in The Book of Opposites. Reviewing the former in The Sunday Telegraph, Matthew Alexander applauded the "rich spiritual-thematic explorations" of the book: "The whale legends and ancient traditions of the islands, the submarine lives of giant mammals connected by sound-telepathy across vast tracts of ocean... from these and many more images and experiences emerges a poignant kind of personal spirituality which leads Daniel to a new understanding of his own humanity."[15] As the author and translator Suzanne Ruta noted in The New York Times Book Review of The Feast of Fools: "Morley writes less as a moralist than as a celebrant."[16]
Love Triangles & Telepathic Lovers
At least half of Morley's novels involve a love triangle, more commonly between two men and one woman (though in the Pernambuco, Brazil sequence of Passage this template is reversed). Yet, in contrast to the love triangle of The Feast of Fools, in which the male lovers' rivalry reaches comically ludicrous proportions (ultimately culminating, as Andy Solomon wrote in The Chicago Tribune, "with an excremental duel that would fall beneath the dignity of the grossest Animal House on any college campus"[17]), those in The Anatomy Lesson, Destiny, or The Attraction of Affinities and, most especially, The Book of Opposites are emblematic of unusually happy, tender interminglings between three human beings united by mutual affection. "Morley’s observing eye," wrote Christina Patterson in The Times Literary Supplement, "though unfailingly cool, is capable of both wit and compassion and he has a good understanding of 'that inequality which is in the nature of love', writing movingly of the tension between life and death, joy and pain."[18]
Telepathy between lovers is also a common feature of Morley's works, notably in Journey to the End of the Whale, in which Daniel's wife Kozue instinctively knows that he is near death, despite his being on the other side of the world at the time, via a mental connection seemingly akin to that of whales echolocating in the deep. This trope attains a new dimension, though, in The Book of Opposites within the tripartite love affair between the "drifter" and sometime physicist Frank, the photographer Wilma Pfrumpter, whose peculiar gift of precognition results in an early career as a remote viewer, and her husband Pfrumpy, whose training in Tibetan Buddhism, in part, holds the key to the mystery of why their car flew off the Glienicker Bridge. The largely anonymous narrator of the novel, who styles himself the "observer", even intuits a possible scientific raison d’etre for this phenomenon of lovers' telepathy in evidence supporting the existence of quantum entanglement.
Writing as 'highwire act'
The idea of writing involving a restive, dangerous commitment on the part of the writer is apparent in Morley's work. Any catharsis found in the act of storytelling seems linked to the inherent risks involved, as evidenced by Boon's descriptions of shodo in Pictures from the Water Trade, specifically in his comparison of the art of Japanese calligraphy to the violence of sumo[19] or the ritual act of seppuku:
- "When Boon knelt on the tatami in his cold bare room (for some reason the cold had a beneficial effect on shodo) and began to prepare for his calligraphical exercises, images of the ritual performance of seppuku would spontaneously come to his mind. Tense, a little excited, like a coiled spring, he mentally went through the motions of the strokes he intended to put down on paper, waiting until he was sure what we wanted and for the moment when he could do it. Now – and without thinking that he had already made up his mind to begin he found the brush suddenly dropping down onto the paper, almost of its own accord. The tip of the brush struck the paper with a slight jar. With a sense of shock he watched it cut a dense black swathe on the blank paper, irreversibly, he could no longer draw back. His pent feelings were released and began to flow down the page in the wake of the glossy ink."[20]
Described in a 2005 profile in The Observer magazine as a man defined "by his compulsion to ride his adrenaline",[21] Morley, on several occasions, came close to death while discovering his fiction. Indeed, when asked by The Observer's reporter "if he started out with nine lives, how many does he think he has left?", Morley answered: "Four".[21] His numerous close calls included a 1973 skiing accident (in which he broke both legs, suffered an embolism and was on life-support for a week),[21] a 1995 bout of malaria tropica in Burma and Thailand,[21] a near-drowning in a local lake in Munich in 2001 on account of a stenosis of the aorta,[21] and two subsequent experiences of open heart surgery, the latter an emergency operation conducted by a doctor who declared his patient to be "a medical miracle".[21] "When I sit down and get seriously into a book, my pulse rate rises considerably," Morley once said. "You cannot live a safe life and an interesting one in this profession. Writing is a frightening business."[21]