Description

His name is Father Laforgue, a young Jesuit missionary come from Europe to the New World to bring the word of God to the heathen. He is given minimal aid by the governor of the vast territory that is proudly named New France but is in reality still ruled by the Huron, Iroquois, and Algonkin tribes who have roamed it since the dawn of time and whom the French call Savages. His mission is to reach and bring salvation to an isolatied Huron tribe decimated by disease in the far north before incoming winter closes off his path to them. His guides are a group of Savages who mock his faith and their pledges even as they accept muskets as their payment.

Father Laforgue is about to enter a world of pagan power and sexual license, awesome courage and terrible cruelty, that will test him to the breaking point as both a man and a priest, and alter him in ways he cannot dream.

In weaving a tautly suspenseful tale of physical and spiritual adventure in a wilderness frontier on the cusp of change, Brian Moore has written a novel that rivals Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in its exploration of the confrontation between Western ideology and native peoples, and its meditation upon Good and Evil in the human heart.

About the Author

Brian Moore (1921–1999) was born into a large, devoutly Catholic family in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His father was a surgeon and lecturer, and his mother had been a nurse. Moore left Ireland during World War II and in 1948 moved to Canada, where he worked for theMontreal Gazette, married his first wife, and began to write potboilers under various pen names, as he would continue to do throughout the 1950s.The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne(1955, now available as an NYRB Classic), said to have been rejected by a dozen publishers, was the first book Moore published under his own name, and it was followed by nineteen subsequent novels written in a broad range of modes and styles, from the realistic to the historical to the quasi-fantastical, includingThe Luck of Ginger Coffey,An Answer from Limbo,The Emperor of Ice Cream,I Am Mary Dunne,Catholics,Black Robe, andThe Statement. Three novels—Lies of Silence,The Colour of Blood, andThe Magician’s Wife—were short-listed for the Booker Prize, andThe Great Victorian Collectionwon the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.After adaptingThe Luck of Ginger Coffeyfor film in 1964, Moore moved to California to work on the script for Alfred Hitchcock’sTorn Curtain. He remained in Malibu for the rest of his life, remarrying there and teaching at UCLA for some fifteen years. Shortly before his death, Moore wrote, “There are those stateless wanderers who, finding the larger world into which they have stumbled vast, varied and exciting, become confused in their loyalties and lose their sense of home. I am one of those wanderers.”