Black Robe

Ronald Conrad is a professor of English at Ryerson University in
Toronto.

Brian Moore is a versatile writer. An Irishman who spent a decade in Canada before moving on to California, Moore has set his novels in various places and has written convincingly from the point of view of both young and old, and of both male and female characters. Now, with Black Robe, he extends his range into the historic and even mythic past.

The novel is first of all a romance, like other recent fiction about the early Jesuits in Canada. It is full of sex (“She shivered in the cold night air, but she was hot under her tunic”), foreboding desolate landscapes, and “savages” who torture, kill, and even eat their enemies. While this often gothic plot makes for a good read, much of it is soundly based on the Jesuit Relations, Moore’s major source for this book. No one who has read Christophe Regnaut’s account of the 1649 martyrdom of Brébeuf and Lalemant will think Moore’s plot gratuitously lurid.

Here and there a detail does seem wrong: Quebec City does not swarm with insects in mid-October, and snowshoeing takes but a few minutes to learn — not days of stumbling about. Moore’s attempt to portray the obscenities of traditional Indian speech reminds us of Hemingway’s peculiar renderings of Spanish dialogue in English. And here and there the plot creaks with coincidence. Yet any historical novel that works at all is a tour de force. Moore does create a strong sense of time and place: a landscape of infinite danger, dread and emptiness — a place for martyrdom.

And, as in almost all his other fiction, the main character acts out a crisis of faith. Father Laforgue is appalled at the conduct of the Indians and even more at the appeal of Indian life for the French immigrants. His young assistant Daniel is slipping from civilization and Christianity to the more animal existence of the Algonkins and of his lover Annuka. Yet Father Laforgue himself commits a sin of intent toward the girl. As he makes his way toward his new post in the wilderness, will he regain his worthiness? Can he, a faltering Christian, lead new souls to Christ? Moore resolves the struggle with a sense of realism and humanity.