Brian Moore must always be a cause both of bewilderment and of envy to his fellow novelists. Whereas other modern Irish writers fizz and flash with stylistic intoxication, he has become increasingly sober. So rarely does he produce an out-of-the-way metaphor or simile that, when he does so, it has an unusually powerful impact….

But, mysteriously, beneath this surface flatness, strange creatures thresh, slither and collide with each other. Many sentences may seem bare, some may even seem banal; but the cumulative impression left by a sequence of them is one of complexity and originality. It is as difficult for another novelist to say precisely how Mr. Moore brings this off as for another dramatist to say precisely how Terence Rattigan accomplished the same kind of feat in a series of plays in which memorable characters come to life out of lines through which no blood seems to...