Book of a Lifetime: No Other Life by Brian Moore

From The Independent archive: Stephen Smith on ‘No Other Life’ by Brian Moore

The Irish-born novelist died in 1999 (Universal Pictorial Press)

These are the days of skittish stock markets, of course, but what of the equally fickle, if lesser-known, index that tracks the popularity of dead writers? Those who follow this ghoulish bourse have noted that death often leads to a sharpish tailing-off in interest before a resurgence – though not in every case. Sentiment in Kingsley Amis is hardening, but there’s no obvious rallying around Brian Moore, the Irish-born novelist who died 10 years ago [Brian Moore died in 1999].

At one time, he was the “greatest living author”, according to Graham Greene, no doubt because Greene shared his preoccupation with Catholicism and the spiritual travails of his heroes. It doesn’t seem inappropriate to speak of Moore’s characters in this way, however, because readers turned the pages of his novels as avidly as if they were genre potboilers. Moore’s style was deceptively unvarnished. He was an unassuming writer who had the rare knack of not repeating himself. These sterling qualities almost certainly counted against him on the Footsie of literary reputation. He was capable of writing a scene with a piercing insight into religious despair that Greene himself, the doubting Catholic, would have envied.

In No Other Life, a missionary recalls his mother’s deathbed recantation. “‘Do you remember when you were a little boy and you did something bad? I would say to you, “Remember, Paul, the Man Upstairs is watching you.” I was wrong to tell you that,’ my mother said. ‘There is no one watching over us’.” It was an episode apparently drawn from Moore’s own experience. In No Other Life, the missionary rescues a boy from poverty and watches him become a revolutionary priest and the messianic president of his Caribbean homeland. By setting the narrative in a fictionalised Haiti, Moore was parking his tanks on Greeneland, or rather his bicycling priests.