Brian Moore: The Chameleon Novelist

R.G. Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and the author of The Salvation
Army and the Public.

As elusive, biographically, as Brian Moore might be, Denis Sampson has
nevertheless managed to mine a variety of sources (diaries, notes,
letters, and interviews) to reveal much of the real and imaginative life
of one of this past century’s most popular writers. Unfortunately, the
book is presented in the form of that unpleasant hybrid, the “critical
biography.” The results are predictable: the critical study of
Moore’s works presented in the book will probably bore the general
reader and fail to satisfy the academic reader. That said, Sampson has
penetrated to the heart of Moore’s success and summed it up nicely:
“he is an Irish and a Canadian and a American novelist, but it is in
his ability to travel in the imagination between those places and beyond
them that is his talent and distinction.”