Colm Tóibín explores the Irish and Canadian roots of the Brian Moore novel Black Robe

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, as the IRA campaign in Northern Ireland intensified and the British response came under greater scrutiny, Irish writers began to explore images of an earlier confrontation between outside forces and a native population. In the last lines of the title poem of his collection Meeting the British, for example, Paul Muldoon wrote:

They gave us six fishhooks and two blankets embroidered with smallpox.

In 1979, the playwright Brian Friel began to keep a sporadic diary as he worked on a new play called Translations, which dealt with the changing of the names of the places in Ireland by the British in the nineteenth century. He knew he was working with two languages: the Irish spoken by the locals and the English by the map-makers. On 14 May he wrote:

‘The people from Urris/Ballybeg would have been Irish-speaking in 1833. So a theatrical conceit will have to be devised by which - even though the actors speak English - the audience assume or accept that they speak Irish. Could that work?’

He was aware that the Irish ‘cultural climate’ in 1833 was ‘a dying climate…the victims in this situation are the transitional generation. The old can retreat into and find immunity in the past. The young acquire some facility with the new cultural implements.’ What interested Friel in the creation of his drama was first of all a world in which two languages collided, but also in which figures from either language, especially the young, were left vulnerable, too ready to work for gain, or too ready to fall in love, to fit the pattern, to play the colonial game as though between settled sides.

Friel’s love scene between the Irish girl who can only speak Irish and the young English outsider who has come to change the names of the places is deeply affecting and powerful. It moved his play away from any possibility of propaganda or political parable, just as Daniel’s fierce attachment to Annuka in Brian Moore’s Black Robe makes the gap between the colonisers and the natives layered with irony and complex emotions. Brian Friel also understood that his drama could be easily played out in societies other than Ireland. He was asked by an interviewer: ‘Do you feel that the play has a relevance to places like Belgium or Quebec, where there is a problem of two cultures?’ Friel replied: ‘Yes I think so. Those are two places I would love to go with this play.’

Although Brian Moore left Ireland definitively in 1948, he got to know a number of Irish writers in the 1960s, including Brian Friel whom he met for the first time in 1969. Later he wrote to him: ‘I know this sounds un-Ulster and extreme, but as it is much easier for me to say it in print than to your face, I am first among your many admirers.’

After the publication of Black Robe, when asked if it reflected his Belfast, he said: ‘Originally, I’d have said that wasn’t true, but maybe subconsciously I was thinking of it. The only conscious thing I had in mind when writing about it was the belief of one religion that the other religion was totally wrong. The only thing they have in common is the view that the other side must be the Devil. If you don’t believe in the Devil, then you can’t hate your enemy and that may be one of the most sinister things about Belfast today.’

In his author’s note to Black Robe, Brian Moore mentioned a piece in Graham Greene’s Collected Essays about Francis Parkman who published his work The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century in 1867. Moore, who, like Greene, was fascinated by unbelief, took a great interest in a French seventeenth century Jesuit mentioned by Greene who, although he detested native life in North America, vowed that he would live that life until he died.

Greene went on in his review to quote Parkman’s outline of the belief systems which the Jesuits sought to combat: ‘In the general belief, however, there was one land of shades for all alike. The spirits, in form and feature, as they had been in life, wended their way through dark forests to the villages of the dead, subsisting on bark and rotten wood. On arriving they sat all day in the crouching position of the sick, and when night came, among the shades of the trees and rocks; for all things, animate and inanimate, were alike immortal, and all passed together to the gloomy country of the dead.’

It is easy to imagine Moore’s concentration deepening for a second as he read this passage and then his lifting his eyes to offer the nearest horizon a forensic stare. This is how novels begin - stray reading or random experience hitting a vulnerable spot in the nervous system, or stirring the set of personal histories and obsessions which we all live with. Moore now has the bones of a book which would become, in my opinion, his best novel.

As he set to work, Moore was not only an Irish novelist, as James Joyce had remained despite his long exile, but a Canadian writer also. He had lived in Canada, mainly in Montreal, from 1948 to 1959 and had soaked up a great deal of the North American experience. In Belfast, as a Catholic, he was part of a minority in a place which had been heavily planted by Scots and English. In Canada, he was in the white majority. As in Ireland, the names of the Canadian places contained the gnarled history of the previous four hundred years - some native, some French, some British - reminding the white victors that this land, where Moore had sought and found some personal freedom, had once been a site of violent and passionate dispute.

Moore’s best two earlier books, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) and Catholics (1972) dramatised the idea of faith and loss of faith, as figures who seemed to belong to the very heart of the church received almost no comfort from its teachings and its power, but rather suffered for their unbelief. It was clear that Moore’s Jesuit in Black Robe, which he began to write in 1983, could not be a fanatic, but a man whose determination and doubt were in the balance.

As Moore settled down to work there was another set of opposites affecting his own style and methods of construction. He was moving towards the clipped tone of his last books, the story briskly told, led by plot, the emotion held in check, with no fine writing, or analysis of personality. ‘I’ve discovered that the narrative forms - the thriller and the journey form are tremendously powerful,’ Moore said. ‘They’re the gut of fiction, but they’re being left to the second-rate writers because first-rate writers are bringing the author into the novel and those nouveau roman things.’ Just as Black Robe itself takes place at a pivotal moment in North American history, so, too, it was being written when Moore’s own interest in narrative drive was at its strongest, but before he had limited this style.

Francis Parkman’s The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century is a godsend to any novelist. The sweeping and confident descriptions of native society are vivid and deeply suggestive. In his introduction, for example, Parkman writes about the role of women: ‘Female life among the Hurons had no bright side. It was a youth of licence, an age of drudgery…Once a mother, married with a reasonable permanency, the Huron woman from a wanton became a drudge.’ It is easy, once more, to imagine Moore lifting his eyes from the book, stopping for a second in reverie, knowing what sharp drama he could make from Parkman’s book. When Parkman describes the lack of privacy, houses lodging more than twenty families, I can imagine Moore thinking of what his Jesuits’s first discomforts will be as he travels with the savages. He can never be alone.

Moore moved from the reading of Parkman’s book to the original documents themselves, steeping himself in contemporary narratives. But this was a story of landscape as much as a spiritual story. Moore remembered the Montreal winters as he began to compose: “I would go into my room and my mind would go back to the Montreal winter I remember and the cold and the St. Lawrence River. When I thought of the river I could see it, because I had gone up and down it so many times.’ He received a grant from the Canadian Arts Council to travel to the places where records were kept and where there were traces of Iroquois and Huron settlements, in particular where the Ontarian government had accurately constructed longhouses, a village and the original Jesuit mission. There is, in the description of landscape in the book, and the worsening weather, a forensic zeal. The sense of cold and hunger are evoked with real skill.

Parts of the novel were written on the wild southern shore of Nova Scotia. ‘I went into the wilderness of this book,’ Moore said, ‘because I had never written a book like this before. I didn’t want to write an historical novel because I don’t particularly like historical novels…I wanted to write this as a tale. I thought of it in terms of authors I admire, like Conrad. I thought of Heart of Darkness, a tale, a journey into an unknown destination, to an unknown ending.’

Perhaps because of Parkman’s detailed account of the native civilisation in his book and Moore’s own background as a Belfast Catholic, Moore managed in Black Robe, in a way that Conrad did not in Heart of Darkness, to make the natives, as he said himself, ‘among the strongest characters in the book.’ Their customs and beliefs, despite the astonishing cruelty they show, are rendered with dignity and mystery. The last illness of Chomina is a haunting and beautiful moment in the book, as is his last conversation with Laforgue: ‘Look around you. The sun, the forest, the animals. This is all we have. It is because you Normans are deaf and blind that you think this world is a world of darkness and the world of the dead is a world of light…If you have come here to change us, you are stupid. We know the truth. The world is a cruel place but it is the sunlight. And I grieve now, for I am leaving it.’

At the centre of Black Robe, however, is the Jesuit Laforgue himself, a towering and haunting presence in his mixture of will and weakness, faith and fear. He is our doubtful and determined hero. Moore is careful to make his responses constantly ambiguous and unpredictable. He is repelled by the love scenes between Daniel and Annuka and also excited by them. He wishes to embrace martyrdom, if necessary, but he also feels fear and pain and pity. He despises the savages and he is capable of feeling sympathy for them.

Because the book centres on matters of faith and the clash between cultures, the graphic and chilling descriptions of violence in Chapter 8 come as a great shock. This is Moore at the height of his considerable powers as a narrator, a manipulator of pace and tone and emotion. It is unsparing of the reader and utterly flawless. We feel such pity and fear for the characters involved and our sympathy for the two lovers and the priest at the end of the book is immense. Moore made sense when he spoke of the thriller in the hands of a first-rate novelist as a most powerful artistic tool. In Black Robe he wrote not only one of the best Irish and Canadian novels of the second half of the twentieth century, but one of the best books in the English language.

Ⓒ Colm Tóibín 2017

This essay was published as an introduction to the 2017 Apollo re-publication of Black Robe