winner Sunday express book of the year/winner Canadian authors association literary award for fiction/shortlisted for Booker Prize ( )

Moore died recently to considerable acclaim as a novelist and with several countries seeming to claim rights: he was born in Ireland, lived in Canada for several years and won the Governor General's award for fiction at least once, but for the last twenty years or so he lived in California. I had heard of, but never read him, and thought I would give him a chance with one of a couple of books of his that I picked up recently in a second had bookstore.

This is the story of a Cardinal (Blem) in an unnamed Eastern European country. who walks the fine line between maintaining the independence of the church and being a toady to the regime. Unfortunately, for some of his flock, his honest, and his view successful policies designed to further the former, are as proof of the latter. An attempt is made on his life following which the secret police put him under protective custody, against his wishes, only they aren't really the secret police but a disgruntled faction of the church which sees him as a block to a real expression of opposition to the regime, a position that he staunchly opposes because of the guaranteed, repressive backlash that would follow, but he doesn't know that they are not really the police until he escapes, but even then he is not sure who he can trust among the state officials or even his own church aides. The story is well-constructed, as Blem struggles to get back so that he can head-off a planned call to resurrection by certain members of the clergy; and the story conveys well the atmosphere of suspicion, mistrust, and confusion that were hallmarks of the soviet-style regimes.

Moore wrote in a very clear, clean style. However, I found that except for Blem himself who experiences some doubt and self-examination as he is exposed to new experiences, the rest of the characters were pretty flat: the inefficient and corrupt public police, the sinister head of the secret police, the prime minister determined to keep order in the country, the opposing clergy, the slightly bumbling clergy-guardian assigned to him in the "protective custody", and the more fanatical members of the opposition; all were fairly one-dimensional. But, I will try Moore again; he wrote something like 15-20 novels.