The dust-jacket of Cold Heaven … claims that it shows [Moore] "at the very height of his powers." The sad truth is quite otherwise. In Moore's last four novels there has been a falling off in quality, freshness and bite so marked as to suggest that the sixty-two year old novelist is now past his peak. The Mangan Inheritance (1979) did have its strong points, including a striking evocation of place. But The Doctor's Wife (1976) and The Temptation of Eileen Hughes (1981) were slick romantic melodramas centring on adulterous passion, containing a spurious religious overlay, and littered with the tourist-eye detail of hotels, restaurants and airports. So is Cold Heaven. It is true that the religious element in the novel is more pronounced and involves apparitional effects that recall Fergus (1970) and The Great Victorian Collection (1975), two of Moore's most impressive fictions. But the more one ponders the comparison the more the...