[In the following review, Gromer criticizes Moore's use of "stick figures, stock figures" in Lies of Silence, which she considers a "tautly told" yet insubstantial thriller.]

"Whatever you say say nothing," the title of a poem in Seamus Heaney's 1975 volume North, could serve as apt epigraph for Brian Moore's new novel, Lies of Silence, which takes him—perhaps as reluctantly as his main character—back to Belfast, his birthplace.

For the lies that Moore sees raging in Ulster, "lies told over the years to poor Protestant working people about the Catholics, lies to poor Catholic working people about the Protestants, lies from parliaments and pulpits, lies at rallies and funeral orations"—are not only sins of commission, but at their worst, they are lies of silence, the lies that come of saying nothing, and sins of omission as well. Most guilty are those in Westminister who turn a blind eye to Ulster and its injustices.

The Northern habit of survival rests in silence. "Smokesignals are loud-mouthed compared with us," Heaney says, and fifteen years later, the characters in Moore's Belfast agree; when they dissent, their act of speech is rained upon by violence or by the threat of it. Perhaps only the Middle East, for many of the same causes—some even having the same agents, Lloyd George, Alfred Balfour, their double-sided negotiating in the first decades of this century, and timeless imperial greed among them—seems as hopeless of resolution as Northern Ireland. "Another martyr for the cause?" a mother, exasperated, questions her daughter in Moore's novel. Weary, she continues, "A united Ireland? Have some sense. The South of Ireland doesn't want us and couldn't take care of us if we were handed to them on a plate tomorrow. It's all madness, this, madness, and don't you be going and getting mixed up in it."

Whatever you say, say nothing: the mother's theme. Brian Moore's theme, however, is not only about the costs of saying nothing in that slippery grey Ulster Heaney calls a "land of password, handgrip, wink and nod," but also about the costs of getting mixed up in it all the same and finding oneself unable to say nothing. That is what happens to Michael Dillon. On the night he has come home ready to tell his wife that he is leaving her for another woman (just as he is leaving Belfast for London), on the night he has gathered together his courage and his passport, he encounters not visions of his new life, but four frighteningly young terrorists of the IRA. Hooded in woolen balaclavas, armed, they force Michael and Moira Dillon to get up from bed and wait for dawn in their living room, watched over by first one guard, then another. Their plan is to place a bomb in Michael's car, and then have him drive it to the hotel he manages, where an Ian Paisley figure named Dr. Pottinger is to address a breakfast audience. As the hotel manager, Dillon will pass through the security guard and park his car in his accustomed spot, just under the windows where Pottinger is to speak. So the assassination is to go, without warning. Moira remains behind in the living room, hostage to the plan's success.

On his drive through the streets of Belfast that morning, Michael Dillon observes details with the hypersensitivity of the newly condemned: three boys rushing and shouting on their way to school, the equestrian statue showing King William in victory at the Boyne, the Victorian houses around Queen's University, alight that day with the festivities of graduation. All these things are almost unbearably alive to him on a drive that seems interminable, packed as it is with the observations of a lifetime, packed as it is with a bomb. The hotel is an eternity and a second away. He parks his car. Overhead, he hears a tour group discussing the benefits of eating up a good breakfast, already paid for, since lunch is both unknown and uncovered. You'll be dead by lunchtime, Michael Dillon thinks in the isolation of his secret knowledge. Don't worry about the Ulster fry.

Dillon, however, decides to tip off the police; the dining room of the Clarence Hotel is damaged, but no one is injured. Neither is Moira, for the teenage terrorists had fled from her living room even before the bomb was due to go off. The daughter of a Catholic butcher on the Falls road, Moira understands lies of silence. She knows in an instant that her husband bartered her life for other lives, just as she knows, without his having said anything, that he will leave her for another woman.

"So, it's better you say nothing," Detective Inspector Harry Randall counsels the estranged couple. But Moira goes on a campaign. Within hours she's on television.

Why does she do this? Why does she break the taboo of the tribe? Is it for those reasons she announces histrionically at dinner when her mother admonishes her to have sense? "It's people like us who're the only ones who can stop them," Moira says, agreeing with her father's outburst against the IRA. "I should tell the whole world what happened to us last night. I should tell the way they treated us…. My husband had to choose between saving his wife's life or saving the life of the likes of Pottinger. We should stand our ground. And then, if we're shot, the whole world will know why we're being shot."

Or is it that Moira gets caught up in her own rightness, and that the injury she's suffered is more personal than political? Her speech comes, at least in part, in bitter retaliation to her husband's silence after the bombing, his betrayal of her during it. Or is it simply that she enjoys the fuss of being the celebrity of the moment, rushed into makeup and onto the air? "Did you see me on the news?" she asks Michael. "Am I all right? My face, I mean?" she asks the producer of the newscast. Moira is not one to forego the careful application of eyeliner, even if it is under the nervous eye of a young IRA gunman.

It's not Brian Moore's intention to show why Moira—or Michael or any of the other characters in Lies of Silence—do what they do. For though Moore has written wonderful novels that portray people of complexity and pathos, the characters in this novel are very little fleshed out, as though stick figures, stock figures, will do for the purpose he has at hand. That purpose is to make us turn pages, quickly, apprehensively; plot is the driving force of our fear. Lies of Silence is a thriller; it is a good thriller, tautly told, chilling. But it makes for disappointing reading nonetheless. It is too spare, too much itself a victim of Northern reticence. It feels shallow, as though with four films of previous novels behind him, Moore was writing it more with an eye to a film than to a reading audience. There is nothing here you couldn't learn in a two-hour movie. The genre of violence does violence to a complex, if contentious, history.

"Is there life before death?" Seamus Heaney quotes a graffitti slogan at the conclusion of his poem. There is not enough life in Brian Moore's new novel for us to care about the deaths which close it.