More than most novelists, I think, Brian Moore enjoys playing with his readers' expectations. Aha, he seems to say, you thought I was writing about this; now don't you feel a little foolish to discover that I was really up to something else—something more innocent and yet more terrible—all along? His new novel [The Temptation of Eileen Hughes] seems at first to have a theme as old as novel writing itself: the seduction of an ignorant virgin by a corrupt man with the compliance of his wife. Not so. Moore's real concern here is with love considered as a potentially fatal disease. It's a theme nearly as old as the other—"Manon Lescaut" and "The Sorrows of Young Werther" spring to mind—but one to which Moore gives an interesting spin: the story is told not from the lover's point of view, but from those of the women involved. (pp. 63-4)

Matters do not turn out well; they never do in this kind of novel. Moore sets up a classic conflict—the predatory rich man accustomed to arranging other people's lives to suit himself stalking the honorable girl for whom concession means escape from a life of genteel poverty—and then devotes most of his story to Eileen's attempts to evade Bernard's attempts at pursuit. Because Bernard is genuinely demented, Moore wisely confines his perspective to those whom Bernard affects. He moves with assurance and apparent ease from third- to first-person narration, gliding in and out of both Mona's and Eileen's thoughts. Moore's prose has always been deceptively simple, never more so than here, yet it accommodates the most complex effects: the scene, for instance, in which Mona's promiscuity is revealed, is done entirely in pantomime, as seen from a distance by Eileen. Poor Eileen: in life, she wouldn't hold our interest for a moment, but such is Moore's art that we are made to care for her—and care what happens to her. (p. 64)