Fiction Tuesday - Brian Moore

You might not be familiar with the name, but he was one of Graham Greene's favorite authors. If you are fan of his, then you might want to take a gander at Moore's work.

Granted, he might be from a different era than what you are used to reading. Yet, he's Irish and tends to write about the different classes of people, especially, those between the Irish and the English.

He himself migrated to Canada. "My first job when I immigrated to Canada was clerk in a bush camp in Northern Ontario. I arrived in a Homburg hat and a 'British warm' overcoat and created a minor sensation among the lumberjacks." Moore says he wanted to be a report, but instead got a job as a proofreader on the Montreal Gazette, in time graduating to reporter and then rewrite man.

"Each book of his is unpredictable, dangerous, and amusing. He treats the novel as a tamer treats a wild beast."-Graham Greene

“One of the master craftsmen of the modern novel.”
–Globe and Mail

Even Dame Maggie Smith made the cover of one of Moore's books. She was in the 1987 film of his work.. - A Potter Tumblr

“Love isn’t an act, it’s a whole life. It’s staying with her now because she needs you; it’s knowing you and she will still care about each other when sex and daydreams, fights and futures—when all that’s on the shelf and done with. Love—why, I’ll tell you what love is: it’s you at seventy-five and her at seventy-one, each of you listening for the other’s step in the next room, each afraid that a sudden silence, a sudden cry, could mean a lifetime’s talk is over.”

—	Brian Moore, The Luck of Ginger Coffey (1960)

“When you’re a writer, you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you, and if you are at all intelligent you realize that you have lost something. But I think there has always been this dichotomy in a real writer. He wants to be terribly human, and he responds emotionally, but at the same time there’s this cold observer who cannot cry.”

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Brian Moore

“Brian Moore’s reputation as a supremely entertaining ‘serious’ writer is secure.” — Joyce Carol Oates

He is possibly one of the most unappreciated authors of our time. My favorite book of his ... The Temptation of Eileen Hughes. Have you read any of his work?


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