Black Robe is both an extension of and a departure from Moore's earlier work. It is an extension of explorations begun in earlier novels because it is concerned with a test of religious faith. It is a departure because its protagonist is a seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary in Canada, a man who cannot be labelled one of Moore's "ordinary people"; and it is a departure formalistically, being a historical romance of the kind written by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Seemingly incongruous with its form, Black Robe is written in a pared-down style that Moore believes complements the self-sustaining power of suspenseful narratives. (This faith in narrative and concern with the appropriate style first emerged in The Great Victorian Collection, 1975.) [In In Their Words: Interviews with Fourteen Canadian Writers, 1984], Moore observed to [Bruce] Meyer and [Brian] O'Riordan that an overriding interest in narrative "forces you to write more leanly—in a direct, clear, clean way. My style has been evolving towards a more plain style." What such a style gains in narrative and poetic force it risks (in the hands even of such post-Hemingway adepts as Norman Levine and Moore) in verisimilitude and atmosphere; and with Moore we are talking of a writer who, as this quotation attests, values story. In Moore's recent novels, Cold Heaven (1983) and The Temptations of Eileen Hughes (1981), this plain style gains much and loses little. In Black Robe the writing is often flat, attenuated to dissipation, seemingly beaten in revision to too airy a thinness. For my taste, Brian Moore writes most splendidly when he imaginatively embeds his talents in the consciousness of his isolated protagonists and goes off in a white heat of defensive, offensive, and hopeful words, giving us characters such as Judith Hearne, Ginger Coffey, Brendan Tierney, Mary Dunne, and James Mangan. Surely a verbal dynamo can drive a narrative as well as does a plain style. Whatever, Moore has chosen the way of stylistic austerity, and an austere novel is what he has given us in Black Robe.

The narrative of Black Robe is the journey towards the Jesuit mission in Huronia (before the massacre there in 1640) of Father Laforgue, his young Norman assistant Daniel, and their Algonquin Indian guides, who abandon Laforgue and Daniel. The priest and young man are later rejoined by Daniel's alluring Indian lover and her family. But only Laforgue is credible as a character; and the details of the journey upriver convey the impression not of a voyage into the heart of darkness but of a glide down a Hollywood backlot. Nonetheless, nothing that Moore has written is without a centre of rich reward. And Black Robe rises to such levels of writing in its sustained positing of radical oppositions. The overarching opposition is that of civilization vs. nature, which opposition the novel expresses particularly in terms of European Christian vs. New World Savage. The European Christians are the original French Catholic explorers/exploiters of the area that became Quebec and Ontario. The New World Savages are Algonquins, Iroquois, and Hurons. Viewed thus, Moore can indeed be seen to have written a Canadian version not of The Heart of Darkness but of Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: the ancestral past and the tension of the spirit and the flesh are Black Robe's true subject. (Moore's use of forest scenes especially brings Hawthorne to mind; I am not suggesting an indebtedness, though, but a remarkable, and I hope illuminating, similarity—in form, style, and intent.)

As deconstruction has reminded us, most binary oppositions are illusions that mask ideological prejudice. We are also that which we exclude from our self-definitions and thereby oppose ourselves to. Black Robe shows the ways in which European Christians such as Daniel, tempted by lust and love, easily become the opposite to that with which they had identified themselves. Black Robe's oft-mentioned scene of cannibalism, where a young boy is parboiled and eaten in front of his father and sister, nicely illustrates this concept of the elusiveness of radical distinctions. Although the Savages are shown to eat their victims ritualistically for a complexity of reasons, one of those reasons is to possess the threatening qualities of a valiant foe. At the risk of trivializing fundamental distinctions—the actual as opposed to the symbolic, for instance—and a myriad of all-important details, it is yet worth noting that one of Father Laforgue's sacred trusts is the Eucharist—the body and blood of Christ that is ritualistically eaten at the anti-climax of the central Catholic mystery. Thus do Cannibalism and Communion help to erase what had appeared to be one of Black Robe's blackest lines of demarcation between Savage and Christian.

The Indians in Black Robe curse a blue streak (or "like nuns," as we used to say) in good Anglo-Saxon. Since other reviewers have made much both for and against the linguistic suitability of the device, I will add only that I think it works well. In any case, few readers who were raised Catholic will regret the purile thrill when the Savage asks the weeping Priest who had been lost in the forest, "What is wrong with you, you silly prick?"