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[REVIEW] Two Epochs of French Colonialism in Fiction

The late Irish-born Canadian author Brian Moore was perhaps underappreciated by the general public, but he has nonetheless a substantial reputation:

In the breadth of his curiosity, empathy and moral intelligence, [Brian Moore] was unique. He wrote persuasively and memorably about terrorists in Ireland, journalists in Montreal, war criminals in France, revolutionaries in the Caribbean, 17th-century Jesuits in New France--and about lost, desperate, yearning people anywhere from Belfast to California.

Some weeks ago, I read two of his most famous books: Black Robe, made into a television miniseries by CBC, and The Magician's Wife, his final novel. I read them one after the other; as I did, I found a fascinating number of parallels and differences. The truism that bpooks can be disintuighsed by things they share and things where they differ wasn't never more truer than with these two books.

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Another Book of Note

Shortly after I finished Brian Moore's two novels, I read Lisa Appagianesi's excellent Paris Requiem. Set in the Paris of the Third Republic at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, this well-written book is at once a thriller and a murder mystery and a meditation on the nature of modernity. In the characters' joys and sorrows, in Paris' technological marvels and dark eugenical biology, in the social fabric of a city that finds itself the meeting point for diverse streams of immigrants and new modes of sexual and gender behaviour, we see a society not too different from our own. A fantastic read.