SOURCE: "The Ordeal of Father Laforgue," in The New York Times Book Review, March 31, 1985, p. 7.

An ex-Roman Catholic priest, Carroll is an American novelist, poet, nonfiction writer, and dramatist. In the following highly positive review of Black Robe, he argues that Moore encourages readers to recognize similarities between the seventeenth-century clash of cultures and ideologies represented in the novel and modern attempts "to divide the world into separate camps of good and evil."

Black Robe is an extraordinary novel. Part adventure story, part the life of a saint, part parable, it is an exemplary act of imagination in which Brian Moore has brought vividly to life a radically different world and populated it with men and women wholly unlike us. His novel's achievement, however, is that, through the course of its shocking narrative, these strangers become first figures of great sympathy and finally images of our own humanity...