SOURCE: "Polish Nightmares," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXIV, No. 20, December 17, 1987, pp. 44, 46, 48.

Ascherson is a Scottish-born English critic and journalist. In the following review, he praises Moore's astute, humane, and suspenseful depiction of Polish religious and political crises in The Color of Blood.

The Color of Blood, Brian Moore's latest novel, was on the short list for the Booker Prize, the main British fiction award. Though widely admired, it did not take the prize; the murmur in London was that it was "slight." A strange reservation. The book is certainly brief, and has the pace and economical structure of a thriller. But it is the work of a masterly writer now at the height of his powers: some of Graham Greene's "entertainments" were called slight when they first appeared, and those judgments seem today absurd. Nabokov's Pale Fire and Lolita, if one judges by length...