Brian Moore: An Appreciation

Editor’s Note: Brian Moore died last week in Malibu at the age of 77. In 1994, he was given the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement by The Times for his many novels. To mark his passing, Book Review asked several colleagues and friends to comment on his life and work.

Brian Moore was that rare thing, a truly cosmopolitan Irish novelist. By now it is a cliche to observe that he was the heir apparent to Graham Greene, a cliche only worth repeating in order to add that at best he was a better novelist than Greene. Moore labored under the burden, which many a lesser writer would be happy to bear, of having written a superb first novel; “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” reads as freshly, and as heart-breakingly, today as it did when it first appeared in 1955. In the last decade he steadily honed his material to a level of extraordinary purity and weight. If he did not produce a Great Novel, he certainly did write a large number of very fine ones. The already sparse fiction lists at the end of the century will be markedly thinner for his passing.