Long Fiction:
Judith Hearne, 1955 (pb. in U.S. as The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne)
The Feast of Lupercal, 1957
The Luck of Ginger Coffey, 1960
An Answer from Limbo, 1962
The Emperor of Ice-Cream, 1965
I Am Mary Dunne, 1968
Fergus, 1970
Catholics, 1972
The Great Victorian Collection, 1975
The Doctor’s Wife, 1976
The Mangan Inheritance, 1979
The Temptation of Eileen Hughes, 1981
Cold Heaven, 1983
Black Robe, 1985
The Colour of Blood, 1987 (pb. in U.S. as The Color of Blood)
Lies of Silence, 1990
No Other Life, 1993
The Statement, 1995
The Magician’s Wife, 1997
Screenplays:
The Luck of Ginger Coffey, 1963 (adaptation of his novel)
Torn Curtain, 1966
The Slave, 1967
Catholics, 1973 (adaptation of his novel)
Black Robe, 1991 (adaptation of his novel)
Nonfiction:
Canada, 1963
The Revolution Script, 1971
Brian Moore’s novels have been praised for their varied settings, stylistic economy, precise realism, careful blending of ironic wit and genuine sympathy, and, most broadly, for their consistently professional quality of composition. The son of James Bernard Moore and Eileen McFadden Moore, Brian Moore was educated in Belfast schools, attending St. Malachi’s College in Belfast until 1940. After serving in an Air Raid Precautions Unit in Belfast from 1940 to 1942, he became a civilian employee of the British Ministry of War Transport and was stationed, in turn, in Algeria, Italy, and France during World War II. After the war, he first served as Port Officer in Warsaw under the United Nations Refugee Relief Agency and then as a freelance reporter in Scandinavia.
Brian Moore
In 1948, Moore immigrated to Canada, establishing residence in Montreal and eventually becoming a Canadian citizen. From 1948 to 1952, he was employed initially as a proofreader and ultimately as a reporter for the Montreal Gazette. In 1951, he married Jacqueline Sirois and also published his first “serious” story, “Sassenach,” in the Northern Review. Still, for almost a decade, Moore supported his interest in writing serious fiction by publishing pulp fiction under the pseudonym Michael Bryan.
In 1955, Moore published his first novel under his own name, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Acclaimed at the time of its publication and still considered one of Moore’s superior novels, it concerns the crisis that occurs in a Belfast spinster’s life when her alcoholism exaggerates her romantic delusions and she must seek emotional refuge in a repressive religiosity.
After moving to New York in 1959 (he later moved to California but continued to maintain Canadian citizenship), Moore received a Guggenheim Fellowship. A year later, he published The Luck of Ginger Coffey, the story of a man who emigrates with his family from Northern Ireland to Canada and must balance his delusions of making a grand success against the demands of his family. For this novel, Moore won the Governor General’s Literary Award of Canada for fiction. In 1966, Moore married Jean Denny, his second wife.
In I Am Mary Dunne and Fergus, Moore adapted the largely representational realism of his early novels to narratives more broadly subjective in structure and in purpose. In both novels, the central characters’ unexamined pasts intrude neurotically on the fragile contentments of their present lives, with the first-person narrative of I Am Mary Dunne imitating an extended exercise of memory and with the hallucinations of Fergus existing almost literally among real circumstances. There is a continuity among Moore’s next three books, all of which explore how the media coverage of “significant” events ironically colors that significance. The Revolution Script depicts the staging of an act of urban terrorism in Montreal. Catholics, for which Moore received the W. H. Smith Prize in Great Britain, is set in Ireland in the 1990’s, at a time when the Catholic Church has for ecumenical reasons proscribed the practice of many traditional rites. The most provocatively imaginative of these novels, The Great Victorian Collection, works from the premise that an ambitious young historian might fall asleep in a motel and awaken to discover that he has dreamed into existence a vast collection of historical artifacts and curiosities that then arrange themselves in the motel parking lot. For this novel, Moore received the James Tait Black Memorial Award and the Governor General’s Literary Award of Canada for fiction (for the second time).
The Doctor’s Wife depicts the dilemma of Sheila Redden, whose adultery while she is alone on vacation forces her to weigh the values represented in her family ties in Belfast against the emotional possibilities that she has lost in that city’s atmosphere of religious violence. In this novel, Moore most effectively combines the poignantly exact realism of his early novels and the more complex rendering of psychological insights characteristic of his later novels such as The Mangan Inheritance and Cold Heaven. Black Robe, a novel about a group of Jesuit missionaries in precolonial North America, sparked controversy for its graphic accounts of ritual torture and cannibalism among warring American Indian tribes. Two later novels, The Color of Blood and No Other Life, also portray clerics who must confront their own faith in the midst of violent social conditions, though Moore sets these tales in the near future instead of the New World.
Moore’s concern with history is shown in his last two novels, The Statement and The Magician’s Wife. The first examines the French government and Catholic Church’s protection of and complicity with Nazi war criminals. The protagonist is based on a functionary of the Vichy government who was found guilty of war crimes and who spent twenty-five years hiding in monasteries and avoiding Jewish agents hired to kill him. In The Magician’s Wife, Emperor Napoleon III orders a magician to travel to Algiers and terrify the locals with his illusions, in the hope of aiding France in its conquest of the territory.
Moore died in 1999 at the age of seventy-seven. He had long been highly regarded in Great Britain and Canada, and his screenplays and later novels had earned for him a reputation in the United States as well. His frequent use of Irish settings and his realistic style may have marked him early in his career as a somewhat provincial craftsman, but he produced a body of work of such consistent quality and increased thematic range to have earned for him a large audience in the United States and a special award from the American Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters.