Brian Moore: Commentary

Commentary

Murray Prosky, ‘The Crisis of Identity in the Novels of Brian Moore’, Éire-Ireland, 6, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp.106-118, remarks that ‘Moore’s novels focus on the breakdown which occurs when an individual alters or represses his deepest desires for the sake of social recognition. His characters [...] are victimised by desire and guilt. [...] Moore recognises the petty forms of tyranny practiced on a personal level by one’s family and friends, on a broader social level by one’s colleagues at work, on a spiritual level by the priestly arbiters of moral values, and on a purely personal level by bellhops, storekeepers, policemen, and judges. Ironically, the values which support this chain of intimidation are upheld by the very people who suffer the guilts and inadequacies it generates. The most pathetic aspect of Moore’s characters is not the humiliation they suffer because they fear rejection; it is the necessity they feel to vindicate their abusers by rejecting themselves.’ (p.106) Further: ‘When Moore’s characters reach a critical juncture where they can no longer sustain their illusions, their despair is compounded by a brief vision of the inadequacy and fragility of the entire social fabric.’ (p.107).

Derek Mahon, ‘Back of Beyond’, review of Catholics, in Listener (2 Nov. 1972), in Journalism: Selected Prose 1970-1995 (Gallery Press 1996), pp.64-65: In Moore’s more recent novels he seemed to be losing the magic touch of Judith Hearne and An Answer from Limbo. Here he is not only back on form but doing something completely different form anything he has done before. having lost interest in Catholicism as such, whilst retaining an interest in the Catholic church as a determining influence in the social and psychological backgrounds of his Irish characters, he now moves into an area we associate with Catholic writers like Bernanos and (in a different way) Greene. Is he going back to the fold. I think not. His new-found interest in religion is less theological than poetic, and intimately bound up with the spirit of place.’ (65). ALSO, ‘Webs of Artifice’ [critical article in The New Review, 1976]: ‘[...] the city [... is a kind of prison, where the lives of the inmates are governed by an authoritarian church besieged by a life-denying, militantly Protestant society which itself suffers from a siege mentality.’ (p.68); ‘although a lapsed Catholic, he retains, like Joyce, the sacramental sense. An object, for Moore, is more than the sum of its atoms; it contains within it a racial memory of its raw material’ [goes on to cite David Jones’s Anathemata.] (p.69); ‘Repeatedly in Moore’s work food and water are associated with spiritual well-being and their absence or perversions with ‘the hell of metaphysicians’ (p.70); (Of Catholics), ‘Mass has been redefined as a metaphor ...’ (p.71); ‘We are to understand that, in a universe without God, the religion of art is the only hope of salvation from the hell of metaphysicians.’ (p.73); A World of Signs’, for Irish University Review, 18, 1 (Spring 1988), here pp.77-79); ‘The fact is, however, that since Cold heaven Moore ahs addressed himself increasingly to questions of faith, as if, like Judith, fascinated by the tabernacle door. (p.79); quotes Terence Brown: ‘the world never seemed to afford enough for Moor’s many victims of circumstance to transcend their predicaments; and those moments in the work when they long to do so likewise seemed as much an authorial cri de coeur as an exigency of the literary matter in hand’; [of the tabernacle door] ‘When that opens ... we leave behind the world of signs for the presence of truth; for now we see through the glass of realism, darkly; but then face to face.’ (Irish Univ. Review, Special Moore Issue; q.p.; here p.78).

Tom Paulin, ‘A Necessary Provincialism: Brian Moore, Maurice Leitch, Florence Mary McDowell’ in Two Decades of Irish Writing: A Critical Survey, ed. Douglas Dunn (Chester Springs: Dufour 1975), pp.244-56: Paulin begins by calling Moore, slightingly, ‘a skilled and highly professional novelist’, and concentrates on Moore’s negotiation of the theme and condition of provincialism in the novels, and also speaks of Moore’s ambivalence about authority. Extracts from the novels include, Judith Hearne, ‘‘The newsvendors call out the great events of the world in flat, uninterested Ulster voices, the drab facades of the buildings grouped around the Square, proclaiming the virtues of trade, hard dealing and Presbyterian righteousness. The order, the neatness, the floodlit cenotaph, a white respectable phallus planted in a sinking Irish bog. The Protestant dearth of gaiety, the Protestant surfeit of order, the dour Ulster burghers walking proudly among these monuments to their mediocrity.’ On Emperor, Paulin comments that Moore is able to understand the temperament that can welcome the destruction of a society but is unwilling to follow through his understanding sufficiently. He regards I Am Mary Dunne (1968), as Moore’s best writing, a lyrical novel, with epithet from Yeats [‘Who can tell the dancer from the dance?’]; conveying recognition of woman’s equivalent centre of being; set in New York; bumps into several people in one day (village-style) who alert her to her life and her father’s death (‘died screwing ... some woman’); tries to ring her mother back in Butchersville; anxieties aroused by finding no answer. Paulin dismissed Fergus (1970) as a failure in which the novelist-narrator brings his whole family as a series of ghostly hallucinations all the way from Belfast Lough to the Pacific; total failure to come to terms with provincialism. He finds Catholics (1972), subtle and impressive; Abbot of a small monastery on an island off Kerry, last place to celebrate Latin Mass; neither Abbot nor Kinsella, the denim-clad radical priest, believe in God, but the dialectic of old and new, Ireland and the wide world succeeds [through a few moments of almost religious texture] where Fergus fails.

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Ronnie Bailie, ‘The Quiet Subversiveness of Brian Moore’, in Across the Roaring Hill: The Protestant Imagination in Modern Ireland, ed. Gerald Dawe & Edna Longley (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 1985), pp.13-27: ‘The meek are to inherit the earth, there is compelling evidence that they will not do so in the short term. The reputation of Brian Moore is a case in point. Moore belonged to a breed of men, a racial or cultural type, to whom self-advertisment did not come easily. In him, the habit of reticence and modesty was deeply ingrained, a part of early upbringing firmly in place long before the adventure of individual choise had begun. The putting forth of any vivid claim to personal claim or talents or virtues was, quite simply, bad form - and a derivative of of pride. The interviews that Moore gave over the years did nothing to dispel a consistent impression of intelligent unassumingness. Now the rhetorical equivalent of this quality of personal presentation is understatement, and understatement is the central characteristic of his creative work. And - thus far - of his fate. By this I mean that his essentially ironic habit as a writer, the habit of appearing to be less than he was, of saying less than he implied, has not always met the act of imaginative promotion that it quietly solicited. His fate is accordingly to have been taken for the most part at face value and granted the faint that damns him to relative mediocrity. [...; The Feast of Lupercal] is a novel that quietyly exhibits the quality that for me is most intimately related to Moore’s creativeness, a quality to which I cannot give a better name than subversiveness.’ (p.13.) Further: ‘Deep in Moore’s work lies the conviction (dramatized supremely in The Temptation of Eileen Hughes, where Bernard makes the fatal [14] mistake of openness) that the essential self courts disaster if it approaches direct self-revelation. You misread Moore if you suppose his cards are ever on the table, if you fail tos ee that he is always secretly “up to something” behind the scenes - and this, however completely he may seem to be taken up - and invite the reader to be taken up - with the public face of his stories.’ (pp.14-15; cont.)

Ronnie Bailie (‘The Quiet Subversiveness of Brian Moore’, 1985) - cont.: ‘There is clearly a fair amount of sexual material in The Feast of Lupercal and while (aside from the reference to Genesis) the novel’s treatment of sexuality does not invoke precise Biblical templates, there is almost no escaping the fact that it does engage with one of the Catholic Church’s most influential pronouncements. For this is a novel which begins as it means to go on, beginning, that is, in a urinal, and progressing (if that is the word) to the boys’ “jakes”. It is possible to read a fair amount of Lupercal as a witty imaginative commentary on Jerome’s inter urinas et faeces nascimur, for the novel is assuredly born in such a place, and the readers borne there more than once. While referring in the first instance to parturition, the famous Latin sentence is, of course, affirming an essential contempt for the human body in its (fallen) procreative function and advancing also, by implication, an inescapably cloacal view of human sexuality. It goes without saying that this important complex of ideas - in which woman is the “fount of pollution” - is not appearing for the last time in Moore’s work. We may expect it to cast a long shadow: two decades later, in The Temptation of Eileen Hughes, Bernard Macauley affirms that sexual intercourse is a function no higher than “relieving yourself”. A little earlier, the sinning “doctor’s wife” is condemned, as her history closes, to the eternal purification of a laundrette. In The Feast of Lupercal the sexual activity of Diarmuid, such as it is, happens in precisely this murky corner of the spirit where the sexual and the excretory functions mingle. References to dust and dirt almost choke the reader of the “seduction” scene. That this night of love should end up celebrated on a lavatory wall of all places is appropriate to the point of tautology. / If any should doubt Moore’s witty imaginative investment in this cloacal theme, he/she could do no better than consider the gloriously amusing reiteration of it in the novel’s subplot. [...]’ (p.18.) Note: ensuing sections treat of Fr. Paul Laforgue, namesake of the apostle whose ‘thorn in the flesh’, conjoined with his injunction that it is ‘better to marry than burn’, has long been an object of biographical speculation among scriptural commentators. Bailie also employs to good effect the phrase ‘gang of virtue’ from Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”.

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Jo O’Donoghue, Brian Moore: A Critical Study (1990): ‘Moore has declared that a novelist’s function does not include commenting on actualities or getting involved in political isues. His own excursion into reportage, with The Revolution Script, was heretofore the exception to this. [xviii] Furthermore, he has put on record his own unwillingness and inability to twrite about contemporary Belfast, the city of his birth, which he left for good in the 1940s. But in 1990, he contravened these self-imposed strictures by producing a novel, Lies of Silence, that deals directly with the political reality in Northern Ireland. [...] Though this novel, in the thriller genre of The Colour of Blood, is, as one might expect, taut, skilfully constructed and compulsively readable, there is nothing of simplisme about it. Indeed, Michael Dillon is a character who as to evaluate his own deepest beliefs, not once, but several times during the time-span of the novel. Through Dillon, a character as apolitical as only a middle-class Catholic from Northern Ireland can be, Moore expresses political viewpoints surprisingly trenchant. Lies of Silence is a moral study, not didactic, but encompassing much more human and political complexity than does the normal thriller’s moral universe. [...] His latest novel, Lies of Silence, shows his artistic courage in approaching subject matter that, until recently, he himself would not have considered possible.’ (pp.xviii-ix; Introduction [end].) [Cont.]

Jo O’Donoghue, Brian Moore: A Critical Study (1990): ‘In Judith Hearne and The Feast of Lupercal Moore certainly chose to reflect his society, both as a means of exorcising his personal bitterness towards Northern Ireland and towards Catholicism in particular, and as a means of making a political statement. His religious and political vision may, in this instance, appear completely negative, but if these early novels are examined in association with his later work, then it can be seen that he does assert a positive value as well. Judith Hearne and [4] The Feast of Lupercal assert a positive value negatively, as it were. What is present in these early novels is religion; what is lacking are freedom and genuine belief. All of Moore's novels, in one way or another, explore the search for belief. The negative beginning is Moore's way of casting off religious attitudes that he, at the time of writing the novels, saw as being completely negative and life denying.’ (pp.4-5.)

Seamus Deane, review of Lies of Silence, in Times Literary Supplement (20-26 April 1990): ‘This is the first time I have read a Moore novel that was willing to risk improbability for the sake of making a propagandist point. [...] It may be a relief for [him] to have got it all off his chest, but he might have done better to write a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph - like that he would have been in the land of fiction without pretending that he was also in the land of art.’ (p.430.)

Seamus Deane, review of Brian Moore, by Patricia Craig, in The Guardian (Sat., 14 Dec. 2002): ‘[...] It is not that Moore fails to be serious, but that he went to some trouble to put the word “thriller” before the word “mystery”, so that the mysterious element never quite disengaged from the secularity of a solution. This became a more insistent issue in his fiction from 1972 onward with the publication of Catholics. It had been there in the angrier earlier novels, audible in the unforgiving tone of Judith Hearne’s final collapse when sympathy for her does not quite cancel out disdain for the superstitions by which she had been so long sustained and imprisoned. / After 1972, Moore looks to the idea of a faith that is worthy of respect, but is not, in the end, deserving of belief. In what can his version of reason believe but reason itself? Clearly there is an allegory at work here. Moore is returning to the Ireland he left, and with each attempted return, each beautifully designed parable, the condition of belief that Ireland comes to stand for becomes more entrancing and yet must be finally dismissed. He cannot bring himself to rejoin what he left; but he cannot stop looking for an alternative to it. / However, if the exploration of the condition of a redemptive belief is a complex feature of Moore’s fiction, there is no comparable interest or complexity when he addresses the political realm. There, in novels like The Colour of Blood (1987) and Lies of Silence (1990), religion returns in its fearsome mode as a rationale, an excuse or a front for state and terrorist violence. In such novels, the thriller element predominates with ease; there is no countering element that needs control. / Yet these novels indicate, too, the author’s continuing and often savage dismissal of his Catholic and republican background, just as the others illustrate his attempts to rediscover the sources of its seduction and the forms of truth that lay behind (or at the root of?) the distortions. [...;’ for full text, see RICORSO Library, “Criticism”, infra.]

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John Banville, review of No Other Life, in Times Literary Supplement (19 Feb. 1993), p.22. Banville remarks on the increasingly economic method of story-telling, producing in Lies of Silence and The Colour of Blood an anaemic deficiency of setting and characterisation, and compares the ‘existential terror’ aroused by one scene in this (that in which the mother speaks the agnostic phrase in the title), and generally commends the author for not losing ‘the power to disturb even as he entertains.’ Banville departs from a reference to Moore’s own professed intention of writing books that can be read at a sitting of a couple of hours.

Joseph O’Connor, review of No Other Life, in Causeway 1 (Autumn 1994), pp.57-58, contains hostile remarks on the disintegration of language and character: ‘It quickly becomes impossible to credit that an oppressed people would be inspired to rise up by sentences so exhausted that they make the rest of us want to go to sleep’.

Sean O’Brien, ‘Vichy’s foot-solder’, review of The Statement, in Times Literary Supplement (22 Sept. 1995), [q.p.]; flight and pursuit; deepening interested in Roman Catholicism, presumptively universal Church; church as protector of war criminal Pierre Brossard [real life Paul Touvier], small time milice functionary responsible for murder of group of Jewish prisoners, 1944; presidential pardon, 1971; charged with crimes against humanity, 1989; believes himself target of Jewish assassination squad; sadist who is sentimental about Vichy and ‘that gentle France ... now gone forever’; kills a would-be assassin; Jesuit Thiers trying to uncover source of his protection (being retired commissioner Vionnet), reflects, ‘in the church, very often, devotion replaces intelligence’; effortless conflation of principle and self-interest; Monsignor le Moyne in Cardinal’s office devoted to securing a pardon for Brossard (‘the number of dead are exaggerated’); reviewer expresses reservations about it the ‘economy’ of the short book, but calls it ‘essential reading’.

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H. M. Buckley, ‘The Old Artificier’, review of The Magician’s Wife, in Books Ireland (1997), [q.p.]; this novel described as ‘a return to form’ in which the novelist reinvents himself as a serious novelist; set in 1856; Emmelie, wife of Henri Lanbert, foremost illusionist; invited to court of Napoleon III; seduced by Col. Deniau, chef of Bureau Arabe, wishing to use her husband to softening up the Algerians for conquest the year after; two-thirds set in Algeria; Lambert wins Legion d’Honneur; one of his best realised female creations; observer as well as protagonist; greedy, lascivious emperor; quotes, “Never in France, in cathedral, convent or cloister, had she felt the intensity of belief everywhere present in the towns, villages, farms and deserts of this land. It was a force at once inspiring and terrible, a faith with nor resemblance to the Christian belief ...”; ethical blindness of European colonial power; manages to turn rebellion into spiritual crusade.

Eileen Battersby, ‘The French Girl in Algiers’, review of The Magician’s Wife, in Irish Times (13 Sept. 1997), [q.p.] remarking on the inconsistent emotional behaviour of the central character, Emmeline, whom Moore has asked to do too much; deeply concerned with morality; though lacking in artistic conviction, the novel is a powerful statement on the evils of colonialism. REVW, Laura Cummings, review of The Magician’s Wife (1997), in Guardian Weekly (5 Oct. 1997), remarks that ‘we never quite glimpse her [Emmeline] except as a radiant reflection in other people’s faces’; ‘Moore’s pacing is exquisite: short scenes driven forward on undercurrents of political intrigue and the sexual charge between Emmeline and the sun-darkened Colonel who has deduced her husband into the Algerian mission’; ‘the marabout leaders is a gentle pacifist, one of Moore’s most tenderly spiritual characters’; ‘intimately nuanced portrait of a lady.’

Jasper Rees, ‘Novel Way to Miss the Booker Prize’ [interview with Brian Moore], Independent (UK), ‘Eye’ (24 Sept. 1997), p.3-4 [photo port.]; quotes Moore on the genesis of Judith Hearne in his experience as ‘a young Catholic intellectual losing his faith. I thought, why don’t I write about someone who might have been a friend of my mother’s and make it a woman?’; claims that no male novelist has written more consistently from a woman’s viewpoint; ‘most of them don’t try’; ‘I’ve always though that any great novelist has got to be able to write both sexes’; speaks of his wartime experience in Algeria: ‘One of my earliest memories was going into a narrow street and seeing a man sitting on what I thought was a huge rubber bag which turned out to be his balls. He was sitting on this disease! The third night I woke up to these screams and ran out to see a thief being electrocuted on the wires’; of his youth in Ireland, ‘At that time, like many people of my generation, I was sick of the old theocratic state that they formed in southern Ireland and of them talking about what had happened in 1916. contains confused and erroneous version of titles, viz., The Magician’s Wife and The Magician’s Tale’ [err.]; also The Testament; quotes Moore, ‘I just never had the slightest desire to be an American. The interesting thing is I realise more and more as I become older that I am Irish.’

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Tom Adair, review of Denis Sampson, The Chamelion Poet (1998), in Irish Times (5 Dec. 1998), [q.p.], remarks author’s dilemma as drawing upon material supplied by the novelist; biography shows Moore’s life dividing chrysalis-like in 1965 when he moves to California with his new partner.

Gerald Dawe, ‘Bring it all back home’, review of Denis Sampson, The Chamelion Poet, in Fortnight (Jan. 1999), p.29: ‘The very fragility of self which Moore’s greatest novels embody, the stringent sense of sexuality, of womanhood as much as manhood, the understanding of loneliness and aloneness are very much predicated upon the overriding imaginative grasp of discovery which characterises the best of Brian Moore’s writing. As readers we are always finding things out, just as if we were confronting things for the first time: this gives to Moore’s novels their sharp, prismatic quality - even down to their very titles: from the Yeatsian Cold Heaven (1983) to the majestic The Statement (1995).’

Thomas Kilroy, ‘Belfast and Moore’s Moscow of the Mind’, [obituary article], Sunday Times, The Culture, ‘Books’ (17 Jan. 1999), pp.8-9: reminiscing about Moore’s visit to the George Moore Summer School, 1990; considers that beneath the elegant exterior of the writer, the anger remains.

Eamonn Hughes, ‘Belfast’s Literary Exile’, obituary notice on Brian Moore, Fortnight (Jan 1999), p.27: ‘The exploration of the issue of faith gives a unity to Moore’s fiction as he extends the range of his writing in both setting and character in works such as The Luck of Ginger Coffey [to] I am Mary Dunne.

Laura Pelaschiar, (‘Transforming Belfast: The Evolving Role of the City in Northern Irish Fiction’, in Irish University Review, 30, 1 (Spring/Summer 2000): ‘Like Dublin for Joyce, Belfast is for Moore the centre of paralysis, a sad, bleak, boring, passionless, unattractive place where narrow-mindedness and mediocrity thrive undisturbed.’ (p.118.) Pelaschiar goes on to say: ‘Belfast is [...] the only Irish metropolis which has been redeemed from its role as the essence of the modern nightmare and which has attained the status of a post-modern urban centre.’ (Ibid., p.130; both quoted in Elaine Kelly, UG Diss., UU 2006.)

Danny Morrison: In his foreword to Patrick Magee’s Gangsters or Guerrillas?: Representation of Irish Republicans in Troubles Fiction (Belfast: Beyond the Pale 2001), Morrison slams Brian Moore’s Lies of Silence as ‘preposterous’ in its account of IRA practices. [See further under Morrison, Notes - infra.]

Colm Tóibín, ‘Brian Moore: Out of Ireland Have I Come, Great Hatred, Little Room’, in New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families (London: Viking [Penguin] 2012), pp.134-55: It is unclear whether Moore ever believed that he had lost anything by his long exile. [...; quotes as infra.] Moore did not witness things changing in Ireland, except as a tourist, and he also missed the slow changes in the way men were treated in Irish writing [Cites Eugene McCabe, Tom Murphy, and J. B. Keane.] (p.145.) From the beginning of Moore’s career a problem existed that came increasingly to damage his novels - a willingnes to work in broad strokes. [...] Yet there is something fascinating [...] Moore is able to render consciousness itself, the mind’s free flow, as a sort of innocence. [...] (p.147.) [Cont.]

Colm Tóibín, ‘Brian Moore [...; &c.]’, in New Ways to Kill Your Mother (2012) - cont.: ‘In a 1967 interview there is a chilling sentence about the mother in An Answer from Limbo who comes from Ireland to New York to look after her grandchildren and save her son and his wife some money: “I could do the mother with my eyes closed.” The mother is, in fact, a collection of stereotypes out of central Irish casting. Moore may very well have had his eyes closed when he imagined her. His sense of Irish characer and Irish speech becomes weaker and weaker, culminating in Lies of Silence (1990), a novel set in contemproary Belfast that has as much truth and local flavour as a CNN news report. Also, many of Moore’s North American characters have a strange land of urgency. / He left the Irish prison and say alone in his cell in an odd imaginative nowhere.’ (p.148.) [Cont.]

Colm Tóibín, ‘Brian Moore [...; &c.]’, in New Ways to Kill Your Mother (2012) - cont.: ‘Moore was clearly damaged by exile because the sort of novel he wanted to write required a detailed knowledge of manners and morals; imaginatively, he lost touch with Ireland and never fully grasped North America. Yet he could not have stayed in Ireland: his independent spirit and questing conscience had no place on either side of the Irish border. Out of this sense of loss and exile and displacement, he p[roduced three masterpieces and an emotional territory filled with loners and failures, faith and unbelief, cruelty and loss of identity and a clear vision of man’s fate.’ (p.154.)

Note: The early parts of Tóibín’s essay largely take the form of a discussion of Moore’s family background, his associated sense of failure and the use to which he put them in his fiction.

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Quotations 

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), ‘This is the way it should have been. Telling it, reversing the events to fit a more dignified pattern, she was [un]easily conscious of the obligations of the lie. Told once, it must be retold until, in the blurring of time, it became reality, the official version, carefully remembered.’ (p.166.) (Quoted in Denis Sampson, Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist, Dublin: Marino 1998, p.95.)

Denis Sampson remarks: ‘It [the opening scene] brings the reader directly into the key aspects of Judith’s character: that she is in the habit of concealing the truth from others and from herself, that she is a victim of carefully wrought illusions, and that the pictures of her Aunt and the Sacred Heart are symbolic forces in her past that have trapped her.’ (Idem; both quoted in Natalie Topping, UG Diss., UU 2006.)

Answer from Limbo (1962): ‘It was air-conditioned and had rows of green plants which were not plants, and tables and chairs which seemed to be made of wood but were some plastic stuff. As she bit into the cake she suffered a familiar disappointment. American food was for show, not for taste. Like the false wooden tables and the plants which were not plants, it was as though no one remembered what the real thing had been like.’ (Quoted in Derek Mahon, ‘Web of Artifice’ [review of Catholics] Listener, 2 Nov. 1972], Journalism: Selected Prose 1970-1995, Gallery Press 1996, pp.64-65, p.69.)

Emperor of Ice-Cream (1965; 1987 edn.), ‘A Jewish name discovered in an account of a financial transaction, a Franco-Prussian victory over the godless Reds, a hint of British perfidy in international affairs, an Irish triumph on the sports field, an evidence of Protestant bigotry, a discovery of Ulster governmental corruption.’ (p.36; quoted in Jonathan Bardon, History of Ulster, 1992, illustrating nationalist propaganda of Belfast Irish News.)

Emperor of Ice-Cream (1965; 1987 edn.): ‘[...] in the stink of human excrement, in the acrid smell of disinfectant these dead were heaped, body on body, flung arms, twisted feet, open mouth, staring eyes [...]. Forbidding and clumsy, the dead cluttered the morgue from floor to ceiling.’ (Quoted in Brian Barton, The Blitz, Northern Ireland and the Second World War, Belfast: Blackstaff 1994.)

I Am Mary Dunne (1968), I hate being a woman, I hate this sickening female role playing. I mean the silly degradation of playing pander and whore in the presentation of my face and figure in a man’s world. I sweat with shame when I think of the uncounted hours of poking about in dress shops, the Narcissus hours in front of mirrors, the bovine hours under hair driers and for what? So that men will say in the street, “I want to fuck you, baby”, so that men will marry me and keep me and let’s not go into that if I don’t want the dooms in spades.’ (Quoted in Hermione Lee, ‘The Gatsby Method’, memoir of Brian Moore, Times Literary Supplement, 22 Jan. 1999 [‘Commentary’], p.14.)

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Lies of Silence (1990), ‘Protestant and Catholic poor confronted each other, year in and year out, in a stasis of hatred, fear and mistrust’ (p.10) ‘Dillon felt anger rise within him anger at the lies which had made this, his ... birthplace sick with a terminal illness of bigotry and injustice.’ (pp.69-70).

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Sundry remarks

Religion (1): ‘I started going to confession as a child and now I [know that I] owe a lot of my troubles to that. I was was a child who incapable of confessing things to a stranger in a box. Particularly sexual pecadillos like masturbation. I was a very highly-sexed child and to be perfectly frank about it, when people say my work is erotic it’s because sex played a big part in my life. I thought about it a great deal when I was growing up and ofeten read books which opened up new worlds to me because I was looking for the “hot” bits. [...] So I had trouble with confession adn I started to tell lies, that was a mortal sin, so automatically I thought there was something wrong with me - I think it affected my schooling.’ (Quoted in Patricia Craig, Brian Moore: A Biography, London: Bloomsbury 2002, p.9; [anon.] UUC UG Diss. 2005.)

Religion (2): ‘I used to say that my secondary school was a priests’ factory. It was quite a hard school, it still exists. We were beaten all the time [...] you were caned for every mistake you made [...] it was a totally inferior method of teaching people, and I am still very angry when I think about it. This was a Catholic school in a predominantly Protestant milieu; therfore we had to get better marks than the Protestant schools.’ (Quoted in Denis Sampson, Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist, Dublin: Marino 1998, p.31; cited in [anon.] UUC UG Diss. 2005.)

A belt of the Bible: ‘I don’t think the real issue is religion. The analogy in the States is the poor whites and the blacks: most Ulster Protestants are the poor whites and the Catholics are the blacks.’ (‘Out of the Pentecostal Backlash’, in The Listener, 88 (2 Nov. 1972, p.596; quoted in Jo O’Donoghue, Brian Moore: A Critical Study, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1990, p,12.)

Religion (3): ‘I felt, and still feel, that both Protestantism and Catholicism in Northern Ireland are the most desperate tragedies that can happen to people [...] I feel there should be a pox on both their houses.’ (Quoted in Jo O’Donoghue, Brian Moore: A Critical Study Gill & Macmillan 1990, p.6; cited in [anon.] UUC UG Diss. 2005.)

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Irish Literature: I’ve felt as a writer that man’s search for a faith [...] is a major theme. For one kind of novelist it’s the big and ultime theme. If you’re an English novelist you write novels of manners, novels of society, novels of class. If you look at Ireland and Irish literature, there are very few Irish novels [of this sort] because society and class don’t operate the same way in Ireland. And so I think that this tendency tis to pick on the meaning of life. The Gael is interested in the meaning of life and he’s usually pessimistic about it.’ (Interview about Catholics, quoted in Sampson, Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist, Dublin: Marino 1998 [q.p.]; cited in Colm Tóibín, ‘Brian Moore: Out of Ireland Have I come, Great Hatred, Little Room’, in New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families, Viking [Penguin] 2012, pp.147-48.)

Irish writers: ‘For those writers born and brought up within its shores, Ireland is a harsh literary jailer. It is a terrain whose power to cpature and dominate the imagination makes its writers for ever prisoner - forcing them, no matter how far they wander in search of escape, to return again and again in their work to the small island which remains their world.’ (Review of John McGahern’s Getting Through; quoted in Tóibín, op. cit., 2012, p.145.)

James Joyce: ‘Yet for the rest of us, failed heirs, false heirs, Joyce remains our mention: he who helped us flay past those nets of home, fatherland, and church, and taught us the rebel cry of non serviam.’ ( ‘Old Father, Old Artificer’, in Irish University Review, 12 (Spring 1982), p.12; quoted in Jo O’Donoghue, Brian Moore: A Critical Study, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1990, p.28.) Moore earlier remarks that Judith Hearne was ‘a character as foreign to me as Bloom must have been to Joyce, but a characer which, in some way, was then my lonely self.’ (Ibid., p.15; O’Donoghue, op. cit., idem.)

Depressing Ulster: ‘If there is anything more depressing than Ulster fact, it is Ulster fiction.’ (Remark of 1976; quoted in James Cahalan, The Irish Novel: A Critical History, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1988, p.263.)

Thriller fiction: ‘I’ve discovered that the narrative forms - the thriller and the journey form - are tremendously powerful [...] They’re the gut of fiction, but they’re being left to second-rate writers because first-rate writers are bringing the author into the novel and all those nouveau-roman things.’ (Review of John McGahern’s Getting Through; quoted in Colm Tóibín, ‘Brian Moore [... &c.], in New Ways to Kill Your Mother, Viking 2012, p.152.)

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