Brian Moore writes an unfashionably pellucid prose so bare of intensifying metaphor that a simple sentence like "The rain wept in front of her" leaps from the page as though it were a bizarre metaphysical conceit. Ironically enough, I read The Temptation of Eileen Hughes in tandem with Anthony Burgess' Earthly Powers, a supremely grandiose account of the terrible temptations—both terrestrial and spiritual—battering fallen man, in which a sentence like "The rain wept in front of her" would only be a drop in the deluge of metaphorical expression engulfing each page. Yet one doesn't really need the experience of reading clotted Burgess to be aware of the thin gruel of Moore; nor is it simply a question on my part of indulging a predilection for the knotty over the spare to say how much less there is of Moore in this particular instance than of Burgess...