SOURCE: "Sorceries," in Essays on Canadian Writing, No. 34, Spring, 1987, pp. 111-18.

In the following essay on Black Robe, McSweeney asserts that Moore could have represented Father Laforgue's crisis of faith more effectively by using "a self-conscious, intrusive narrator," but praises the novelist for depicting both the Native Americans and the missionaries "in ways that sharpen the reader's attention and intensify his response to the text."

"Few passages of history are more striking than those which record the efforts of the earlier French Jesuits to convert the Indians. Full as they are of dramatic and philosophic interest … it is wonderful that they have been left so long in obscurity." So wrote the American historian Francis Parkman in the preface to his The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867), one of the most dramatically interesting volumes in his monumental France and England in North America. As Parkman explains...