Much is made by writers these days of the need for ‘getting distance’, for putting frontiers, oceans, whole continents between themselves and the sources of their inspiration. A spell on a Mediterranean island, a prolonged residence in some foreign capital or a creative writing fellowship at an American university are all supposed to do the trick. To advertise the whole business more effectively, you can always engineer a noisy parting of the ways with the British reading public, so unforgiving of your success, so philistine and parochial, and flounce off to New York, where your genius will be properly nurtured and cosseted.
For Brian Moore, the necessary distance was acquired through a fortunate combination of accident and circumstance, as opposed to any deliberate gesture of angry alienation. It was as a journalist that he chose to emigrate from Britain to Canada in 1947, though with nothing in the way of a specific job to look forward to. Fetching up in Montreal, he was easily seduced by the city’s exoticism and elegance, so that even a bilingual sign rendering ‘Hot Dogs’ as ‘Chiens Chauds’ held an irresistible enchantment. Here, following a tentative start as a short-story writer, he began trying his hand at hack thrillers in the Chandler-Hammett mode, under the name of Brian Mara, before taking off into serious fiction in 1955 with The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.
The experience of writing the book taught him, in some sense, why the journey to Canada had been necessary. Its spinster heroine, unloved and unlovable, anaesthetising solitude with religion and respectability, was a figure from the Belfast boyhood he kept on exorcising, from one aspect or another, throughout his literary career. Her visits had been a dismal constant of life in the family house at Clifton Street, where Moore’s parents formed part of that irredentist Catholic minority left on the wrong side of the Irish dividing line after 1916.
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