The trouble with this Mr Nice Guy

Brian Moore: A Biography by Patricia Craig

Writing many very good novels does not automatically make someone an easy subject for an autobiography. The important thing about any artist is what he creates, and if he happens to be a writer his process of creation is - to the onlooker - boring: scribble-scribble, with long intervals of broodiness before the next scribble-scribble. If the scribbler happens to be, in addition, a bit mad, or disagreeable in some surprising way, or wildly promiscuous, or a closet sadist or whatever, then an autobiographer has something to work with. But if he happens to be simply very nice .... well, it can be a bit of a problem. And Brian Moore was a much nicer man than most good writers.

Patricia Craig knew him, and liked him personally as much as she respected his work. So did I. I therefore know that she is accurate in her portrayal of his intelligence, honesty, good sense, wit, charming sociability, gift for friendship, and absolute devotion to his true love once he had found her. The affection and respect which informs that portrayal warms my heart, but it won't make headlines.

She does, however, deal well with the two dramatic developments in Brian Moore's life. The first of these is crucial: why did this son of loving and comfortably-off Northern Irish Catholic parents reject his native land and the faith he was raised in (though never his family), escaping to foreign parts as soon as the Second World War gave him the chance? He lived thereafter first in Canada (he took out Canadian citizenship), then in New York, then in California. Craig shows that even before he was alienated by the fiercely Catholic schooling provided by St Malachy's College, his nature was slightly aslant from his family's: that the writer's questioning mentality was at work from childhood, long before he himself recognised it. And she also shows how irrevocably the world he had rejected remained within him, to become the chief of his resources as a writer.

The other big development was his breakthrough into emotional and sexual fulfilment. Soon after the war, when he was working in Poland, Brian fell wildly in love with a fascinating and difficult woman who ended by dumping him in a cruel way. As a result he decided that he was finished with romantic love. About three years later he married Jackie Sirois because he liked her, they suited each other in many ways - and also almost because he was not infatuated by her.

Craig, who is always scrupulous in not allowing her liking for her subject to carry her away, is gently sceptical of his eventual claim that this marriage was a disastrous mistake from the beginning - there is too much evidence that it worked well for several years. But she has no doubt at all that he would have made a disastrous mistake if he had not ended it when romantic love came surging back with the appearance in his life of Jean Russell.

They ran away together, and once the hornet's nest of pain and grief any such break causes had calmed down, happiness began. For the next 30 years, until his death, there was little to say about him except that he had found enduring serenity, and to describe the books he continued steadily to produce.

Perhaps because Craig knew she would be short of material once she reached this second marriage, she makes rather too much of the very beginning of her story: the two chapters in which she establishes the Moore family's background, and the character of Brian's father. It was not really necessary to give as much detail about the family's history as she provides. But on the whole this likeable and trustworthy biography is pleasant reading. You probably need to be one of the many whose imaginations have been enlarged by the novels of Brian Moore in order to enjoy it, but if you are one of them you will enjoy it very much.