Critics have persisted in forging similarities between Moore and his compatriot-in-exile, James Joyce. Jack Ludwig, for instance, saw Moore in 1962 as Joyce's heir in the genealogy of Irish fiction ["Brian Moore: Ireland's Loss, Canada's Novelist," Critique 5 (Spring-Summer 1962)]. Hallvard Dahlie, in a well-written and perceptive account of Moore's work, sees Joyce's progress from Dubliners to Ulysses reflected in Moore's own development from The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) to I Am Mary Dunne (1968) [Brian Moore: Studies in Canadian Literature (Toronto, 1969)]. He perceives in both authors not only a shift from naturalistic techniques to experimentalism but a movement from despair to affirmation.

Such a comparison might pass muster if critics did not also assert that Moore's work, like Joyce's, is a fictionalization of the central dilemma facing man today. That dilemma has been capsulized for us by two Moore critics. According to Ludwig, Moore's characters "ask themselves the question facing twentieth-century man: knowing what he does about all things political and social how does man still get out of bed in the morning?" John Stedmond in his introduction to the Canadian edition of Judith Hearne claims that this novel "probes what David Daiches has called the central question in modern fiction: 'How is love possible in a world of individuals imprisoned by their own private consciousness?'"

These approaches to Moore are misguided. Moore's fiction strikes me as interesting and refreshing precisely because it does not focus upon an essentially twentieth-century predicament. The dilemma faced by Moore's important characters—with few exceptions—is in fact a primitive rather than modern dilemma. It is created by the characters' exclusion from the community and their subsequent occupation of a ritual limbo through which they seek to pass as quickly and as successfully as possible. Though Moore occasionally diverges from this theme—most notably in An Answer from Limbo—each of his novels remains to greater or lesser degree a variation of it, but a variation that contributes to the pattern of the total canon. As I have tried to show elsewhere, Moore's two early Belfast novels explore ritual failure and the punishment and exclusion attendant upon such failure in a rigidly structured and provincial community ["Crisis and Ritual in Brian Moore's Belfast Novels," Eire-Ireland, Autumn, 1968, pp. 66-74]. Ritual failure I define as the inability to perform the rites of passage on the way to self-fulfilment within one's own group. This theme extends with variation into the North American novels, but later gives way to the cognate theme of ritual displacement which Moore exploits most fully in I Am Mary Dunne. Ritual displacement occurs when the individual is unwilling or unable to perform the rites of incorporation into a new society and thereby find happiness and fulfilment. Since Moore is a novelist and not a sociologist, I want to make it clear that I use the term "ritual" not in reference to specific rites and ceremonies, but rather to the rhythms of separation, initiation, and incorporation common to all societies and communities.

The Luck of Ginger Coffey, Moore's third novel, balances the two themes of ritual failure and displacement and is thus a pivotal work in the development of Moore's thematic concerns. Coffey does not fail sexually, as do Judith Hearne and Diarmuid Devine (in The Feast of Lupercal), but rather in his inability to carve out for himself a successful career in a world which deems professional success a desirable form of social advancement. As a result, he almost loses his wife and daughter to a more successful man.

Failure breeds failure for Ginger Coffey, creating in him a besieged state of mind in which paranoia can take root. The CRIPPLE MATE CASE he follows on newsstand headlines is a soap-opera fantasy of self-pity in which Coffey is the innocent victim of a conspiracy, guilty only of an incapacity he cannot help. Self-pity gives way to infantile regression during which he envies his child neighbor for living in a world of toys where no demands are made and no responsibilities are exacted. Moore presents a cruel symbol of this regression when he has Coffey find a job at Tiny Ones Inc., a Montreal diaper service.

The reversion to fantasy in the face of failure and bewilderment was a favorite resort, also, of Judith Hearne and Diarmuid Devine. There are other correspondences: in all three novels the social repercussions of failure are the same—exclusion from the community and the retraction of roles for the failure to play. Because he is unwilling to take a job unequal to his ambitions, Ginger Coffey finds his roles as husband and lover, father, and breadwinner challenged and for a time seriously threatened. As in the two previous novels, the failure is simple but the repercussions immense.

The Luck of Ginger Coffey, then, like its predecessors, is a novel about the price society exacts for failure. In each of the three novels, there is a climactic scene in which the confrontation between victim and society is brutally apparent. In Judith Hearne it is the scene in which Judith Hearne is forcibly ejected from the convent; in Lupercal, the scene in which Devine is caned. In Ginger Coffey it is the scene in which Coffey is booked on an indecent exposure charge after urinating in a doorway. In this scene, as in the other two, there is injustice at work as society misinterprets and overreacts—comically in this novel—to a minor transgression. Moore here bestows on Coffey, as he did on his two Belfast characters, something approaching the status of community scapegoat.

Though Ginger Coffey is structurally a much simpler novel than either of the earlier Belfast novels, in terms of Moore's work as a whole it represents a thematic advance. Ginger Coffey has been a failure in Ireland and, half-outcast, has withdrawn from the scene of battle. His failure within his own community is largely self-originating as was Judith Hearne's and Devine's. But when he emigrates to Canada, his subsequent failure becomes more complex and the responsibility for it less easy to assign. Coffey in Montreal is a stranger in a strange land and occupies the limbo of all newcomers. The dilemma of ritual failure has become the dilemma of ritual displacement; to the limitations of his own small talents is added the task of weathering the formidable if informal initiation rites facing him as a New Canadian. In terms of the ritual status of the individual, failure and displacement are two sides of the same coin: both result in exclusion and isolation, dangerous conditions of existence from which he struggles to extricate himself.

Coffey brings with him from Ireland the slap-happy heartiness, transparent manner and sheepskin jacket mentality of a bluffer who imagines himself a Dublin squire. He finds, alas, that these are flimsy credentials in a country preoccupied with hard talk, hard work, and equally hard cash. Only by lying can he survive and even then it is a precarious survival. In one sense, the novel is Ginger Coffey's education into the economic and social ways of Canada: it is no coincidence that the man to whom he almost loses his wife is a nattily-dressed, smooth-talking, getahead native Canadian against whom New Canadians have to compete. The novel is strewn with those who found the competition too stiff and who went under—old Billy the Irishman, for instance, in whom Coffey sees a terrifying prefiguration of himself.

And yet, in another sense, Coffey is Canada itself, uncertain, callow, occupying that limbo between Dominion and sovereign Republic, between the old country and the United States, between the promise and fulfillment of nationhood. Among the pub-frequenting proofreaders, this is a favorite if obscurely understood topic. "Poor old Canada," laments one, "not even a flag to call its own." "They sneeze in the States and we get pneumonia here," observes another. "Greatest mistake this country ever made was not joining the United States." The same men are willing to defend Canada vigorously when Coffey denigrates it, and thus exhibit what seems at times to amount to a national political schizophrenia.

Perhaps these two interpretations—Coffey as both hapless immigrant and as Canada herself—are not as far apart as they seem: the education of Coffey into the ways of a new and brutal world might be seen as the education of Canada into such a world. I imagine that such a view might strengthen the claim that in Ginger Coffey Moore has produced Canada's best novel to date, a claim that ought not, however, to inflate the novel's reputation.

Part of Coffey's difficulty in adjusting to Canadian life is due to the fact that he has not separated himself fully or decisively from his past in Ireland. And so the mores of Irish provincialism continue to haunt him. They are even embodied for him in the figure of Eileen Kerrigan, the Irish immigrant who recognizes Coffey from the old country as he stands, mortified, in his Tiny Ones uniform. And the patronizing admonitions of his former parish priest ("… if you burn your boats, you'll sink. You'll sink in this world and you'll sink in the next …") stay with him; little wonder, for they illustrate graphically the vicious parochialism of a people who both despise and envy those who attempt to shake off the spiritual and moral shackles that bind. The Irish exile is always admired, never forgiven.

But if Coffey cannot blot out the past, he can at least ensure a future. By the end of the novel Coffey has successfully performed the rites of incorporation—hardship, humiliation, temporary loss of social and personal identity—into Canadian society. The indecent exposure charge can be seen as the last "initiation rite" Coffey must endure before becoming a genuine Canadian, without the qualifier "New." The novel is thus more optimistic than the two previous novels because it ends, though Coffey may not recognize it, on a note of success.

But acceptance into Canadian society is only the beginning. In terms of Coffey's ability to forge a successful life within his new group, the ending is less optimistic. That is to say, he can begin afresh, and receives legal and emotional warrant to do so (having won back both his wife and his freedom), but he must drastically lower his standards. To this extent the ending spells resignation, though a healthier resignation than Judith Hearne's or Diarmuid Devine's. Their resignation is the abandonment of all hope whereas his refuses to countenance total defeat. "Life was the victory, wasn't it?" he asks, with characteristic melodrama. "Going on was the victory. For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health …" Like Judith Hearne and Devine, he has come to know his limitations. But his are fewer and less crippling. He has his wife and daughter and the genuine hope of a job befitting his meagre talents. He has stopped, acknowledged, and is ready to begin in a new way.

Only one of the three plotlines of Moore's fourth novel yields to a ritualistic interpretation, though it happens to be the most successfully handled of the three. Let me briefly mention the others.

Among other things, An Answer from Limbo is Moore's Kunstlerroman. The question whose answer echoes from limbo is that confronting Brendan Tierney the struggling writer: is he prepared to sacrifice anybody or anything for the sake of his work? He is, and the resulting emotional abandonment of his wife, children, and mother constitutes one of the main themes of the novel. Behind the question of emotional sacrifice is another: should he sacrifice integrity and quality in order to gain instant success on the popular market? Tierney's crisis is a legitimate imaging of limbo but is not the kind of ritual or social limbo with which I am here concerned. The ethical and aesthetic problems facing Tierney face every writer whether it be in Florence, Italy or Florence, Oregon. Since they do not spring directly from the mores of the writer's context and location, a ritualistic reading would be unilluminating.

For a similar reason I do not wish to spend any time on the second plotline of the novel: the lapse into infidelity and indignity of Jane Tierney during her search for a dark ravisher. This is the weakest part of the novel, for her dark ravisher, Vito Italiano, never in name or deed rises above the level of crude caricature. This might ironically reflect upon the kind of woman this frustrated writer's wife becomes, but no amount of intended irony could possibly compensate for over-simplified characterization, especially when genuine characters are being created alongside Italiano. The figure of Jane Tierney herself is interesting mainly because she seems in some respects to me a warmup for a later creation, Mary Dunne.

It is the novel's third thematic strain that most forcefully links this work to the rest of Moore's canon: Mrs. Tierney's passage from Ireland and her subsequent destruction at the hands of an alien culture. Brendan's mother is the most successfully realized character in Limbo and after Judith Hearne perhaps Moore's happiest creation.

Mrs. Tierney, unlike the major characters of Moore's previous novels, is successful in worldly terms. She was pretty when younger, reflects Brendan at the close of the novel, married to a successful man, well-off, and widely loved. "Yet," he reminds himself, "she died alone in the limbo of a strange apartment and lay dead until, by accident, a stranger found her." Her isolation at the end is therefore contrasted to the fullness of her past life in Ireland.

Mrs. Tierney's material success is not the only difference between herself and Moore's previous heroes. While they attempt to escape the bondage of their past, she wishes strenuously to preserve hers and thus to prevent her absorption by an alien culture. Fittingly, her life ends with the ritual affirmation of her past in prayer and supplication, and in an implicit denial of the new world she finds so hostile. Yet Mrs. Tierney's career in the novel can still be seen as a passage through limbo, but a return passage through memory back to the ritual celebrations of her life—her children's births, her daughter's marriage, her husband's death.

Mrs. Tierney is a more admirable character than Ginger Coffey, if only because she makes an attempt to reestablish in New York the important values of her life in Belfast. This cannot be explained away simply in terms of her age and inflexibility set against Coffey's youth and adaptability. Coffey never did and never will have values that promote any kind of spiritual well-being. He is, as he says, "neither fish nor fowl, great sinner nor saint." This typically hand-me-down Coffey metaphor is as far as he is prepared to pursue the matter. On the other hand, Mrs. Tierney is a devout Catholic who suddenly finds herself in a Godless home and a Godless society. Intolerant and atavistic, she is the perfect foil to Brendan and Jane whose hypocritical and facile tolerance renders her less unattractive to the reader than she would otherwise appear.

Alarmed at the spiritual condition of her grandchildren, she surreptitiously baptizes them and the discovery of her act results in the final estrangement between mother and son. Neither her God nor her piety is welcome in the chic New York apartment and she goes off to die alone with her empty pleas for help and her invocations to an ancestral God. Her death—a familiar Moore victimization scene—three thousand miles from home in a strange apartment is a cruel irony for a woman who sets great store by the primitive delights of neighborliness and community. And it is an irony compounded by the fact that she dies at the feet of a blaring television set, as though it were some Christian or pagan divinity instead of the mass-producible apostle of amorality it actually is.

In Mrs. Tierney, Moore has abandoned the theme of ritual failure and concentrated upon the theme of ritual displacement. Like Ginger Coffey, Mrs. Tierney suffers the isolation of the newcomer which in her case proves fatal. As always, Moore appears critical of the community and society that victimizes his character. Mrs. Tierney is destroyed because she refuses to abandon both the past and its values in order to gain entrance to the world Brendan and Jane represent. This is not to say that Moore assents to her values: quite clearly he would reject them as he did in Judith Hearne and Lupercal. It is rather a matter of comparative evil, as if during his Greenwich Village stint Moore found something to fictionalize even worse than Irish-Catholic bigotry and intolerance—the wilful jettisoning of integrity, dignity and belief. And so, for once in Moore, provincialism becomes a virtue, a bulwark of sorts against the erosive hyprocisies of modern, cosmopolitan life.

How far the theme of ritual displacement can be taken is explored in Moore's sixth and best novel since Judith Hearne. In I Am Mary Dunne, Moore brings important thematic tributaries of his first five novels together in a fictional confluence and tour de force.

Moore establishes in his latest novel an analogical series of movements which represent, literally and metaphorically, the stages leading to the crisis of limbo. Mary's husbands and suitors—Jimmy Phelan, Ernie Truelove, Hatfield Bell, Terence Lavery—constitute the series of roles Mary has had to fill, and at the same time roughly parallel her wanderings from Nova Scotia to Toronto to Montreal to New York. These phases of her life she remembers during and after a day's activities that provide the chronology of her recollections in bed that same evening. Mary Dunne is therefore a cleverly wrought work and, less spacious than An Answer from Limbo, a return to the claustrophobic confines of a woman's fevered mind, where it all began for Moore. But the differences between Mary Dunne and Judith Hearne are several and large.

For one thing, whereas Judith Hearne is imprisoned in her past and her unchanging identity, Mary Dunne struggles throughout the novel to find one identity among many in which she can heave to and find refuge. This points up one crucial difference between ritual failure and displacement. The failures, Judith Hearne and Diarmuid Devine, find themselves unable to change and to move forward. Theirs is the limbo of stasis. Conversely, the displaced, Mrs. Tierney and Mary Dunne, find their continuum of identity splitting and strive to mend the breach, Mary Dunne through a neurotic recapitulation of the past, Mrs. Tierney through a sense of the past bolstered by her religious belief. Theirs is the limbo of instability. Ginger Coffey is the transitional figure in all this: the failure who forces himself to change by putting his identity up for grabs in a new country.

The threat to Mary Dunne's identity is much greater than that to Mrs. Tierney's. She is now Mary Lavery but she was Mary Bell and before that Mary Phelan. Each marriage required of her a different role to satisfy each husband:

… I play an ingenue role, with special shadings demanded by each suitor. For Jimmy I had to be a tomboy; for Hat I must look like a model: he admired elegance. Terence wants to see me as Irish: sulky, laughing, wild. And me, how do I see me, who is that me I create in mirrors, the dressing-table me, the self I cannot put a name to in the Golden Door Beauty Salon?

Similarly, she accuses herself of obscuring her real identity behind a mask in each of her careers: "… weren't they just roles I acted out? Even acting itself." She has been student, writer, actress, provincialite, wealthy cosmopolite moving in sophisticated New York theatrical circles. She has cast off and put on so often that she seems to live between roles as frequently as she does within them.

Her upward social mobility is paralleled by a kind of upward sexual mobility. Two things haunt her: the memory of her father's death during an act of adultery, making her fear her own strong sexuality; secondly, her guilt-inducing treatment of her second husband, Hatfield Bell. Among the men, it is Bell who dominates the novel, eclipsing Mary's current husband as a character and a force in her life, though it is with Lavery that she claims to have found sexual and emotional happiness. Mary outsexed Bell as she did Phelan before him. This must be seen as a factor in Mary's insecurity before, and after, her marriage to Lavery. The inadequacies of her men she long believed were due to her own unattractiveness, and the feeling persists in nightmare. Her movements from place to place and man to man can therefore be seen as a quest after sexual and emotional fulfillment.

But if Mary has achieved material and sexual success as Mary Lavery, why does she affirm her identity at the end of the novel, and after a symbolic as well as physical act of sexual intercourse with her husband, as Mary Dunne? Has she, like Mrs. Tierney, returned safely to her origins and thus resolved the identity crisis of the novel?

A proper reading of the end of the novel is crucial for an understanding of what Moore is trying to do. Mary's crisis apparently lasts but one day, but we are to assume I think that this identity crisis, though precipitated by premenstrual tension, is an accumulation of the smaller identity crises of her past. How we interpret the ending of the novel will therefore determine how successfully we think Mary, postmenstrually, will pull out of this biggest crisis of her life. Here is the last ringing sentence of the novel:

… I know who I am, my mother said tonight that I am her daughter and while she lives I will be that, I will not change, I am the daughter of Daniel Malone Dunne and Eileen Martha Ring, I am Mary Patricia Dunne, I was christened that and there is nothing wrong with my heart or with my mind: in a few hours I will begin to bleed, and until then I will hold on, I will remember what Mama told me, I am her daughter, I have not changed, I remember who I am and say it over and over and over, I am Mary Dunne, I am Mary Dunne, I am Mary Dunne.

Dahlie sees this as an act of desperate affirmation, and elaborates:

… in the act of remembering her past, she attains the identity spelled out by the book's title: the identities she had temporarily assumed as Mary Phelan, as Mary Bell, as Maria, and now as Mary Lavery, cannot obscure the only unchangeable fact about her, that she is, and always will be, Mary Dunne … no legal or social vicissitudes can alter what she was born—Mary Dunne.

Elsewhere he calls Mary Dunne's affirmation an "attainment of calm" ["Moore's New Perspective," Canadian Literature, Autumn, 1968].

Dahlie misses the central irony of the novel. We have to note that what looks like an affirmation is an attempt to affirm, which is not at all the same thing. Mary's repetition of her identity, in the anxiety of imminent menstruation, is like a captured soldier's repetition of his name, rank, and serial number—affirmation of a formalized, legal identity that satisfies neither himself nor his captors. Again, Mary's dependence upon what her mother has said in a brief telephone conversation testifies to her utter insecurity, not to any degree of certainty whatever. This "affirmation" caps the irony of the novel: in her current relationship with Lavery, Mary has found emotional satisfaction, as well as material success, yet in a crisis hearkens back to a past she cannot bother to recollect in detail.

For it is not Mary Dunne we come to know but rather Mary Phelan and, supremely, Mary Bell. We know Mary Dunne only as the child who suggested that the Cartesian maxim, cogito ergo sum, might better be rendered as memento ergo sum. This is a curious emendation on the part of the child: we might even on the strength of it view Mary's subsequent life as a self-fulfilling prophecy, as if she had received philosophical license during childhood to wander whither and with whomever she pleased in the comforting knowledge that her identity remained safe at home in Butchersville, Nova Scotia. But even though she holds under duress of premenstrual tension to her Cartesian modification, her life and her recollections of that life disprove it. She is Mary Dunne, but is also each of her subsequent identities, not at once but successively. She is, in fact, the changeling she fears herself to be.

It is tempting to view Moore's North American fiction as more optimistic than his earlier Belfast fiction. The shift from parochial to cosmopolitan settings and from the burdensome piety of the chief Belfast characters to Mary Dunne's practical morality would seem to represent a movement from bondage to emancipation. It is almost as if Moore's novels trace the growing fortunes in a new continent of one hypothetical immigrant who has escaped Belfast's lower middle-class tedium. In accordance with this view, we might also see the characters of the North American novels as less constrained by ritual forces and community dogmas, making a ritualistic reading of the novels less pertinent.

Yet we should be careful not to oversimplify the direction Moore's work is taking. There are, we should remind ourselves, significant interruptions in the flow of the canon. Ginger Coffey is clearly more optimistic than Mary Dunne because one of its themes is ritual success. And Mrs. Tierney, an obviously sympathetic character, never in spirit leaves the restrictive Irish world Coffey flees in the preceding novel. Even more important than these interruptions is the discovery by Moore's latest characters that the absence of community dogmas is an even more terrifying predicament than their smothering presence. The world that Mrs. Tierney rejects is the world Mary Dunne inhabits: a faithless, structureless, impersonal world. Mary Dunne's response to this "emancipation" is to deny it by mistakenly stating that her identity resides in her beginnings. Yet it is clear to the reader that her problem, insofar as it is not simply premenstrual, can only be solved if she stays with Terence, establishes roots, forgets her past and constructs a future.

And so there is no suggestion in Moore's latest novel that happiness and identity lie outside ordinary human relationships and group values. Certainly Mary Dunne's plight cannot be construed as the "dreadful freedom" of the existentialists, or even as the plight of the twentieth-century man Stedmond and Ludwig are talking about. For the heroes of a great deal of contemporary fiction, neither society nor the community is desirable or possible as a lasting source of strength and identity. On the other hand, we sense that Mary Dunne's crisis is her failure, not society's. As a Nova Scotian woman who in thirty-two years has changed her social circumstances more often than most people do in a lifetime, she is clearly an atypical figure with an unrepresentative problem. She is the primitive outsider, a perpetual stranger who has denied herself the comforts of ritual and community. Whereas Ginger Coffey and Mrs. Tierney pass through limbo, one into death, the other into the life of the community, Mary Dunne's cry of false certainty barely masks the fear of eternal isolation.