Almanac of Story Tellers: Brian Moore

Every day brings a new story.  And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books. 

Today is the story of Aug. 25th

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    It is the 237th day of the year, leaving 128 days remaining in 2022. 

   

    On this date in 1921, the Northern Irish writer Brian Moore was born in Belfast.

    Moore wrote his stories from various perspectives, but in distinctive voices that ranged from an elderly woman growing lonely as she sinks into alcoholism, to a middle-aged man trying to charm his way out of a mostly unsuccessful life. 

    Although he left Ireland as a young man, Moore also wrote about the sectarian conflicts in the country before and after World War II. A lapsed Catholic, he could write scathingly and sympathetically about the Catholic faith and people, and its overwhelming impact on Ireland.

    After graduating from college, he moved to England to work, and he served in the Ministry of War Transport. He then moved to Canada, where he lived for several years and became a citizen, before eventually settling in the United States.

    His first writings were thrillers written under a pseudonym. What Moore considers his first novel is The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearn, published in 1955. It tells the story of an aging, unmarried woman who tries to hold on to pretentions of her own refined social class as her problem drinking escalates.

    Moore wrote about Ireland's sectarian Troubles in The Emperor of Ice Cream, about a young Catholic man in World War II Belfast who joins a Protestant air-raid precautions group and finds friendships. The Feast of Lupercal is a story about a middle-aged Catholic teacher, single and sexually inexperienced, who falls in love with one of his teenage, female, Protestant students.  

    He took on colonialism in Canada in Black Robe; he writes in the voice of a young, beautiful, and successful woman having a series of flashbacks about her insecurities in I Am Mary Dunne, and he tells the tale of a middle-aged Irishman living in California who is haunted by the literal ghost of his father arising from a dream in Fergus.

    Three of his books were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He twice won the Governor General's Award for Fiction, considered a top literary prize in Canada.

    Moore died in 1999 at his home in Malibu, Calif.