[In the following review, Lehmann-Haupt praises Moore's characterizations, his "unadorned but evocative prose," and his depiction of spiritual conflict in Black Robe.]

As Brian Moore explains in an author's note that precedes the opening of his unusual new novel, Black Robe: "A few years ago, in Graham Greene's Collected Essays, I came upon his discussion of The Jesuits of North America, the celebrated work by the American historian Francis Parkman (1823–1893)."

A passage cited by Greene, about the extraordinary dedication of one particular 17th-century Jesuit Father, led Mr. Moore to read Parkman's great work and to discover that his main source was the Relations, the voluminous letters that the Jesuits sent back to their superiors in France. In the Relations themselves—and in "their deeply moving reports" revealing "an unknown and unpredictable world"—Mr. Moore found the inspiration for Black Robe.

If the route to his material is somewhat remote, the ground he arrives at will be familiar enough to anyone who has followed Brian Moore's fertile and inventive career as the author of 14 novels, among them The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, The Emperor of Ice Cream, The Great Victorian Collection, and his last, Cold Heaven. For it is understanding God's mysterious ways that concerns Mr. Moore in this imagined account of a dangerous trek through the wilderness north of Samuel de Champlain's Quebec settlement.

Whose version of the spiritual realm was more valid, Mr. Moore seems to be asking—"the Indian belief in a world of night and in the power of dreams" or "the Jesuits' preachments of Christianity and a paradise after death"? Could one set of beliefs be comprehended by followers of the other? What if Christianity was actually inimical to "Les Sauvages", as the Indians were collectively known to the French? What if the Jesuit fathers, or "Blackrobes," as the Indians called them, were corrupted by savage spirits?

If this summation makes Black Robe sound like thesis fiction, it is not altogether misleading. "This novel is an attempt to show," Mr. Moore concludes his introductory note, "that each of these beliefs inspired in the other fear, hostility, and despair, which later would result in the destruction and abandonment of the Jesuit missions, and the conquest of the Huron people by the Iroquois, their deadly enemy."

Yet if he is painting by the numbers, he has done an admirable job of modulating the colors within the spaces of his canvas. A reader is immediately intrigued with the figure of Father Laforgue, the guilt-infested missionary who is trying to reach an Indian community up north where disease has broken out and a priest has been murdered. Mr. Moore's unadorned but evocative prose creates a powerful sense of the lonely North American wilderness. "The day passed. The sun, high in the sky, dipped until it barely cleared the tops of the trees. A wind rippled the water into waves, a wind which numbed Laforgue's cheeks. He remembered what Father Bourque had told him of a second false summer which came in mid-October, bringing a few days of heat at the end of the autumnal season. That false summer was ending. Winter was near."

Mr. Moore has done a particularly good job of representing the Indians, succumbing to neither the noble-savage nor the lo-the-poor-Indian cliche, but instead representing what is known to have been their obscene and joshing banter with a liberal dollop of four-letter words. Most admirably of all, he has balanced perfectly the two spiritual worlds. When Laforgue recovers suddenly from an illness for which his Indian escorts are threatening to kill and ditch him, it might with equal plausibility be credited to the God to which he prays, or a hump-backed Indian sorcerer who is convinced Laforgue is possessed by a demon, or just plain chance.

The novel's realism breaks down only in the speed with which Laforgue and an Algonquin family recover from the tortures inflicted upon them by some Iroquois who capture them. It is a necessary part of Mr. Moore's grand design to illustrate both how and why the Indians "practiced ritual cannibalism and, for reasons of religion, subjected their enemies to prolonged and unbearable tortures." Yet having made his point—in scenes where the Iroquois "caress", their victims most horrifyingly—he hurries on a little hastily, and the reader must wince in sympathetic pain at what their injured persons are asked to perform.

But it is with spirits and not bodies that Brian Moore is ultimately concerned. And it is spirits that finally suffer the real and lasting damage in Black Robe. "We have become as bad as the Normans themselves," argues one Algonquin leader, referring of course to the French. "We have become greedy and stupid like the hairy ones."

And at the point where the plague-ridden Indians finally accept the offer of baptism out of fear that the priests have cast a spell on them, Laforgue reflects, "What are these baptisms but a mockery of the Church, of all the saintly stories we have read of saving barbarians for Christ?"

Yet despite these realizations both the Indians and the priests continue to work at cross purposes. The result is inevitable and tragic—the mutual destruction of their souls.