SOURCE: "Blue Streaks," in Canadian Literature, No. 110, Fall, 1986, pp. 150-52.

In the following review, Lynch criticizes what he considers the sparse prose and often-underdeveloped characters of Black Robe, but praises Moore for suggesting that the Jesuit missionaries were in some respects as "savage" as the Native Americans they attempted to "civilize."

Black Robe is both an extension of and a departure from Moore's earlier work. It is an extension of explorations begun in earlier novels because it is concerned with a test of religious faith. It is a departure because its protagonist is a seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary in Canada, a man who cannot be labelled one of Moore's "ordinary people"; and it is a departure formalistically, being a historical romance of the kind written by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Seemingly incongruous with its form, Black Robe is written in a pared-down style that Moore believes complements the self-sustaining power of...