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Vancouver Sun (09/Jun/1990) - Moore: Ireland's runaway rebel son

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Moore: Ireland's runaway rebel son

He condemned both Catholics and Protestants in his new novel but still got a warm reception at home

Raised as a Belfast Catholic, Brian Moore knows how deeply the feelings run between religious factions in his native land. Yet many Irish view Moore as an outsider. He rejected Catholicism, pronouncing himself an agnostic, and fled the country for Canada while in his 20s. He eventually removed himself to a secluded beachside home in Malibu, Calif. (although he retains his Canadian citizenship), about as far as one can get from the grey stone and iron of Northern Ireland's streets.

So when Moore condemned both Catholics and Protestants in his new novel, Lies of Silence, he expected a chilly reception at home. The response was quite the opposite.

"I was waiting for the reviewers and interviewers to bring that up," says Moore who, though he's been away for most of his 69 years, retains an Irish accent.

"They didn't. The people who read the book said this is the way it is, and no one has written from that point of view before. One of the reasons I wrote the book is that people are sick of all this violence. They just want to get on with their lives."

In the novel, a middle-aged hotel manager and his wife — whom he's about to leave for a younger woman — are held hostage in their home by Irish Republican Army terrorists. After the incident, the man must decide whether to act against his perpetrators, one of whom he can identify.

Moore had some help in the research. His brother-in-law, a surgeon, once treated an injured member of the British anti-terrorist squad, who provided details of such operations: the sentries, the scouting, the two-way radios and the masks and the pecking order within a terrorist group.

The author learned to do his homework from the great film director Alfred Hitchcock, for whom he wrote the screenplay for Torn Curtain.

"Hitchcock had what he called the 'icebox theory,' " says Moore. "A man goes to a film with his wife, comes home. They take a piece of chicken out of the icebox and start talking about the film, and she says, 'You know, the bus doesn't run from Oxford to Ireland on Thursdays.' And they sit down and destroy your movie, because they find all the other things that are wrong with it.

"The theory holds for books. The little details have to be believable, or the reader won't believe in it."

Almost every Moore novel (he's written 17) is different from the last, a fact that has irked some publishers, who like to see successful novels turned into formulae. There are, however, certain themes that keep cropping up. Moore's characters often hit a crisis point where they have to close a door on their past and open another to an unknown future. They have to deal with broken marriages, loneliness or loss of faith.

The latter theme has been used enough that some readers, Moore's older brother for one, have accused him of being "obsessed with religion."

Moore laughs at the remark.

"My older brother isn't too keen on me," says Moore, who comes from a family of six girls and three boys. "He thinks I write dirty books. He's very Catholic."

But is Moore obsessed with religion?

"When I came to Canada and started writing, I realized religion was something I could write about. I've always been interested in people who believe in something, and religion is one form of belief that people understand. If you write about politics, like this book, in 20 years it may be totally dated, people won't understand why people behaved the way they did. If you say someone is losing his faith, that's universal. So I use religion as a metaphor for any kind of belief."

It seems odd that a man who's been married for 23 years would write so often about unhappy relationships.

"Well," he says, "I have a happy second marriage but I was married before, and I had a lot of girlfriends before. So I've been through a lot of that stuff."

(Moore has one son by his first marriage. He's a computer programmer in San Francisco.)

Moore has no book projects in the immediate future; he'll be too busy with film projects. This fall, director Nicolas Roeg brings out a movie based on Moore's Cold Heaven. Moore has just written the screenplay of his novel Black Robe, which Bruce Beresford will begin shooting in September, with Timothy Dalton playing the priest. That makes five Moore novels that have been made into films.

Film has been good to Moore in a monetary sense, but he's not enamored of Hollywood because "they change the endings." It isn't just Hollywood that changes endings: the British-made version of Moore's first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (Handmade Films), tinkered with the original finale.

"I was disappointed in the film," says Moore. "They made the ending much more hopeful than it should have been. Setting it in Dublin was a big mistake, because everyone in Ireland said this was a book about Belfast. It was just a little off."

Moore says with the 50th anniversary of Dieppe looming shortly, he would like to write a screenplay dealing with the Second World War Canadian massacre.

"It was Canada's Gallipoli," says Moore.

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