[Deane is an Irish poet, essayist, critic, and educator. In the following negative review of Lies of Silence, he contends that, although there "are few better living novelists than Brian Moore," his representation of the crisis in Northern Ireland is stereotypical and inaccurate.]

There are few better living novelists than Brian Moore, but one would find little support for that statement in this book. Since the publication of Catholics in 1972, he has consistently found ways of bringing the secular world into collision with metaphysical or religious phenomena and of allowing the subsequent reverberations to shake the foundations of both. There has always been an investigative, sleuth-like aspect to his writing. We can detect that something is wrong because the symptoms of unease are so marked. The source of the wrong is often found to be rooted in the very assumptions on which the investigation itself was based. The diverse worlds of his fiction—Belfast, Toronto, New York, California, Eastern Europe, seventeenth-century Canada, a future world off the south-west Irish coast—are painstakingly fumigated of all illusion but the disinfectant clarity that results may itself be the most powerful illusion of all. The withering economy of Moore's prose, the sardonic observation of social and political systems, are indications of a highly cultivated detachment that ostensibly accepts no reality that cannot be directly experienced in and through the body.

Of course, since he is a novelist, this "belief" undergoes its own subversion; worlds work in slippery ways, stories are acts of interpretation as well as acts of reportage. By emphasizing the reportage, he can appear to subdue the interpretive element. But when sheer reportage threatens to enforce interpretations that would question the narrowly solid world we know by our senses, then a heat tremor seizes everything and renders it insecure. Earlier novels such as The Great Victorian Collection (1975), The Mangan Inheritance (1979) and Cold Heaven (1983) absorb this insecurity into their rhetoric and narrative; the more recent Black Robe (1985) and The Colour of Blood (1987) privatize it. It is not, in them, a question of a consciousness that doubts its capacity to know the world; rather, it is a question of a consciousness that cannot know itself. The only recourse in these instances is to silence. It may be a dark fate but it's also a chaste one. On the other hand, those who are full of certainties are ready to make whatever noise is necessary to assert their claims. The loudest noises are made by weapons. A gunshot ends Moore's last novel, The Colour of Blood, and his new one, Lies of Silence.

There the resemblance ends. The lies of silence are told by just about everyone—the British Government, the Christian Churches, the general populace. For here we are in Northern Ireland, specifically in Belfast, and the story concerns a crisis of conscience in a man, Michael Dillon, who has to make two crucial decisions. One is to identify a member of the IRA to the police; the other is to tell his wife he is leaving her for another woman. The first decision has two phases; first he contacts the police to tell them that there is a bomb at the hotel he manages, even though he is thereby risking his wife's safety, since the IRA unit involved is holding her as hostage. Second, he has to decide to identify a young IRA man who had unwittingly let Dillon see his face during the takeover of the Dillon household. Despite the urgings of a slimy Catholic priest, Dillon decides to go ahead with the identification. But, even though he has by now got out of Belfast to London, the IRA have (through the priest) tracked him down, and kill him as he telephones the police in Northern Ireland. Phase two of his decision made, he is silenced.

The meaning of the connection between the two choices involved here escapes me. Moreover, since Moore takes the opportunity to launch a series of punctual tirades against all who have conspired to produce the Northern Irish crisis, it seems improbable that any deep morality is involved in bearing witness against the IRA or against a corrupt system. The IRA men are the usual stereotypes—rough, tough, never nervous, plagued by acne and a poor education. Indeed everyone involved is stereotypical, except that the IRA is in Moore's firing line, and all his blank ammunition reverberates around them. The strain of his tendentious account of the political crisis shows in uncharacteristics slips—a university degree ceremony at 8.00 in the morning, an IRA unit going to the trouble of making a hit in London, given a legal system that has long dispensed with the need for evidence; a Catholic priest complicit with the IRA in a manner that is improbable in itself and inaccurate as a representation of the relationship between the two organizations. This is the first time I have read a Moore novel that was willing to risk improbability for the sake of making a propagandistic point. The lies of silence are in what this novel does not say about the North. Otherwise it is a satisfactory summary of all the clichés. It may be a relief to Moore to have got it all off his chest, but he might have done better to write a letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph—like that he would have been in the land of fiction without pretending that he was also in the land of art. Perhaps the next novel will be one of his miracles; then this one can be left in its own, sad silence.