Brian Moore: Novelist In Search Of An Irish Identity

Contemporary Review, April, 2001 by Liam Heaney

BRIAN Moore, who died in the final year of the twentieth century is increasingly seen as one of the most perceptive novelists of that troubled era. He was born in Belfast on 25th August 1921 and was raised in a devout Catholic family, with six sisters and two brothers. He was educated at St. Malachy's College in north Belfast and at the age of 20 be left home and saw action as a supply clerk with the Allied forces in Italy. In 1948 he went to Canada with his first French wife, Jacqueline Sirois, and his son, working as a journalist in Montreal for a number of years. His early education and religious upbringing in Belfast were to have profound effects on him as a writer. In 1953 he quit his job as a journalist, took out Canadian citizenship and began writing novels. The latter pursuit was to be his passion for more than four decades.

Brian Moore was a writer of outstanding talent, a consummate storyteller. As we will see, his works display an acute awareness of human faults and frailties and his writing exhibits a vividness and an elegance that makes it a pleasure to read. Moore had a unique capacity to generate suspense and tension in his carefully constructed story lines and many of his characters are cogent, credible and convincing. They are observed struggling with the hardships of daily life and living, experiencing failure, guilt, isolation and loss of faith in the process. Some are faced with seemingly insurmountable difficulties, difficulties which often have their origins in relationships, religion or politics. Nonetheless, some of Moore's characters possess the determination and resilience to face their problems and hardships. Others fail dismally in this regard. Those that survive may be isolated, displaced and alone, but they persevere with their lives. They press on in the hope that something better will emerge.

As testament to his popularity and to his flair as a writer, Moore's work has been translated into sixteen languages, five of his books have been made into films and he himself received numerous awards in several countries. He was twice the winner of the Canadian Governor-General's Award for Fiction and was short listed for the Booker Prize on three occasions. Moore gained international recognition and fame with his first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955). The novel is set in Belfast and tells the story of a lonely, disillusioned spinster who takes refuge in alcohol. She fantasises about a romance with James Madden, an Ulster American who has returned to Belfast. But Madden is not interested in her. At the end of the novel, Judith continues to be watched over by her aunt's picture positioned on the dressing-table by her bedside. Judith appears to be controlled by her memories, by her religious upbringing and by her environment. These influences have hampered her emotional, social and psycholo gical development. Judith's plight may be mirrored in the lives of many women and men in towns and cities throughout the world. The dilemmas she faces are at the heart of life and living.

Moreover, these dilemmas reflect, to a large degree, Moore's own apprehensions and concerns about his own identity as a writer, a theme he was to probe consistently throughout his writing career.

Although Moore spent most of his life in Canada and in America, it was Ireland, particularly the west coast of Ireland, that remained very much a part of his thinking as a writer. Moore acknowledges this affection when he says, 'there is something about this place, some sense of the past thrusting itself forward, something eerie -- ghostly -- something almost metaphysical, which can change our normal way of seeing things ... The West is a place where I feel, suddenly that anything might happen, perhaps even a miracle' (Simpson, 1998).

In spite of this finn and potent attachment to Ireland, Brian Moore, like many great literary figures before him, such as Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, to name but a few, was compelled to leave his native land in order to nurture and to pursue his artistic talent. This sense of displacement is a frequent theme of Moore's works and is addressed in novels, such as, The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960), An Answer from Limbo (1963) and The Mangan Inheritance (1979). Moreover, the city of Belfast is frequently used by Moore as the location for his stories. In addition to the novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Moore exploits the streets of Belfast in The Feast of Lupercal (1958), The Emperor of Icecream (1965), The Doctor's Wife (1976), The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (1981) and in Lies of Silence (1990). This quite clearly demonstrates the city's powerful influence on his creative thinking as a writer. The city itself is very much alive and vibrant in his imagination. In spite of his affection for Ireland, Moore continued to live in Malibu from the middle 1960s with his second wife, the Canadian Jean Denney, whom he married in 1967. Nonetheless, Ireland and Belfast in particular, as his works demonstrate, persisted in stimulating his artistic imagination.