Black Robe is set in seventeenth-century Canada. Father Laforgue, a Jesuit, has come to the remote and hostile territory to convert the heathens. The novel dramatizes the conflict between his certainties and the beliefs of the natives, which are presented with immense conviction. The narrative is powerful and emotional, and the violence in the book is shocking, more graphic than anything in Cormac McCarthy. The landscape, the dark forest, the constant menace, the untamed world, are wonderfully evoked. This is Moore’s darkest book and most haunting; his account of the Jesuits’ colonial enterprise, which echoes other moments in the history of the building of empires, is gripping and deeply disturbing.
Brian Moore was born in Belfast. In 1948 he emigrated to Canada. He lived in California for many years. He wrote numerous novels including The Emperor of Ice Cream (1966), Catholics (1972), a W. H. Smith Award winner, The Great Victorian Collection (1975) and The Colour of Blood (1988).
Age in year of publication: sixty-four.
Frank Moorhouse 1938–
1988 Forty-Seventeen
The hero of this novel calls himself variously Sean or Ian, seeming unable to make up his mind between the Irish and Scots version of his name, a fitting bafflement for a modern Australian male, floating in beer and fornication yet emitting muffled longings to be otherwise.
About to become forty, a drinking, writing man addicted to women, he is partial to sluts. His grandmother made a fortune being a whore in the caves of Katoomba, and the seventeen-year-old girl he truly loves has departed to London to find herself by becoming a call-girl. His ex-wife Robyn is about to die of cancer. Among the high points of the novel are Robyn’s first letters to him; everything that is lost in middle age is plaintively rendered in the naive voice of this young girl. Then there is Belle, one of those sluts who get the blues, and the invaluable seventy-year-old Edith with whom he travels to conferences in Vienna and Israel.
This is a finely crafted work, cleverly moving back and forth through time, written in rueful, mocking prose. Moorhouse’s artistic achievement is to give his hero a life that seems casual, but this man on the loose is in fact ligatured to women, and the novel beats with a particular pulse of desperation which is both touching and exhilarating.
Frank Moorhouse was born in Nowra in New South Wales and lives in Sydney. Among his prize-winning novels are The Americans, Baby (1972) and Grand Days (1993).
Age in year of publication: fifty.
Toni Morrison 1931–
1987 Beloved
‘For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one.’ This is Paul D., whom Sethe, our heroine, has known in slavery. He has not seen her for eighteen years, and now he has come to visit her when her husband has disappeared, her mother-in-law is dead and her two sons have left, her house is haunted by her dead baby daughter, and she is living alone with her daughter Denver. It is 1873 in Ohio. Sethe is torn with memories of the dreadful past, the petty cruelties of being a slave, and then the particular viciousness of certain events which she finds almost impossible to contemplate, and yet cannot forget.
The novel’s strength comes from its obsession with the power and the problems of love between people who are enslaved and savagely exploited; there is an extraordinary skill in the way the narrative goes back over events of the past while focusing also on the domestic minutiae, small moments of tension, the play of light, the interior of the house, the constant efforts to survive the catastrophe which haunts the novel and indeed haunts the reader. The figure of the mother-in-law Baby Suggs, who has been bought out of slavery by her son, is especially memorable and sad; the idea of the house being haunted by the dead child is presented calmly and with authority and becomes immensely credible.
Toni Morrison was born in Ohio and lives in New York. Her other novels include Song of Solomon (1977), Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1998). She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Age in year of publication: fifty-six.
Alice Munro 1931–
1990 Friend of My Youth
Alice Munro territory is the Ottawa Valley, in the small harsh Munro towns of Logan or Whalley. These are the towns people leave and come back to, but the place and time hardly matter with Alice Munro because she writes about apparently ordinary folk and therefore all of us, wherever. Alice Munro’s people are careful souls, you think. But here she skewers those moments when change comes about because of one incident which, taken at the flood, leads on to divorce, another husband, another wife, a different town, a different life.
Simply told, these gossipy, wise stories are full of recognitions: ‘One evening Raymond had said to Ben and Georgia that it looked as if Maya wasn’t going to be able to have any children. “We try our best,” he said. “We use pillows and everything. But no luck.”’ ‘I used to sneak longing looks at men in those days. I admired their necks and any bits of their chest a loose button let show.’ A wife leaves her husband: ‘He said he was giving her a week to decide. No more drinking. No more smoking … Karen said don’t bother with the week.’
Each story is as rich as a novel. Her characters stand next to you, about to engage you in conversation, their lives laid bare with slashing accuracy so that reading about them, the heart is stopped as something familiar, hopefully hidden, surfaces in a sudden, illuminating way.
Alice Munro is one of the greatest short story writers; only Chekhov comes to mind when contemplating her work. Alice Munro was born and lives in Canada. Some of her award-winning collections are The Progress of Love (1987), Open Secrets (1994), which won the W. H. Smith Award in 1995, The Love of A Good Woman (1998) and Runaway (2004). She was awarded the Man International Booker Prize in 2009.
Age in year of publication: fifty-nine.
Iris Murdoch 1919–1999
1968 The Nice and the Good
Iris Murdoch had an extraordinarily rich if uneven career as a novelist. She published more than twenty-five novels, and of these the one that we would most recommend readers to begin with is The Nice and the Good.
Most of the novel takes place in a large old house beside the sea in Dorset where Octavian Grey, a civil servant, his wife Kate, their daughter Barbara, and an infinite number of friends, servants, house guests and hangers-on spend the summer. The novel has Montrose, the best cat in any of the novels listed in this book (Graham Greene’s The Human Factor has the best dog): ‘a large cocoa-coloured tabby animal with golden eyes, a square body, rectangular legs and an obstinate self-absorbed disposition’. The writing is elegant; Murdoch handles the large cast of characters with great clarity and skill — the children are especially good. She carefully surrounds some events in the novel with echoes of myth and magic, while leaving others as undisturbed pieces of social realism. Her characters are both vividly drawn and credible, but they also operate on other levels, as forces in a field of energy.