Brian Moore: A Critical Study

Moore grew up in Northern Ireland and as a young man spent a number of years travelling throughout Europe while working for the British Ministry of War Transport. In 1948 he left for Montreal, where he began his literary career. While living in Canada he supported his writing by working as a proof-reader, reporter, and pseudonymous thriller-writer. He wrote his first serious novel, Judith Hearne, during a stay of several months in a log cabin in Quebec's Laurentian Mountains. After eleven years in Canada, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and moved to New York. He eventually moved to Hollywood to write a film for Alfred Hitchcock and now lives in Malibu, California. Jo O'Donoghue identifies Moore as a writer particularly interested both in questions of religion and in a world he believes to have largely abandoned traditional spiritual values. Moore's Irish Catholic upbringing, she demonstrates, has located him in an enclosed, self-sufficient community with a strong sense of the spiritual. O'Donoghue regards Moore as remarkable among modern male novelists for the depth of his interest in women and the sensitivity and acuteness of his insights into women's psychology. Although Moore, in a literary career spanning more than thirty years, has published sixteen novels and one work of reportage and has won numerous literary prizes, he has only recently attracted the sort of consistent critical acclaim which is his due. The Colour of Blood finally secured recognition for him as one of the truly important novelists of the late twentieth century. O'Donoghue's study is the first major critical analysis of the work of this gifted and accomplished writer.