More than most novelists, I think, Brian Moore enjoys playing with his readers' expectations. Aha, he seems to say, you thought I was writing about this; now don't you feel a little foolish to discover that I was really up to something else—something more innocent and yet more terrible—all along? His new novel [The Temptation of Eileen Hughes] seems at first to have a theme as old as novel writing itself: the seduction of an ignorant virgin by a corrupt man with the compliance of his wife. Not so. Moore's real concern here is with love considered as a potentially fatal disease. It's a theme nearly as old as the other—"Manon Lescaut" and "The Sorrows of Young Werther" spring to mind—but one to which Moore gives an interesting spin: the story is told not from the lover's point of view, but from those of...