Belfast’s best-kept secret

A SENSE OF CHAUVINISM — IN ITS ORIGINAL MEANING — led me in early adulthood to regret and even resent that Northern Ireland had few world-class novelists. The problem seemed particularly acute when I looked south and saw how well-supplied Ireland was. Perhaps C.S. Lewis would do, not for Narnia but for the Cosmic Trilogy? Or Bernard MacLaverty, though his output of novels is sparse? Then I discovered Brian Moore (pronounced Bree-an), whose status as the best Northern Irish novelist — who can stand toe-to-toe with the twentieth century greats — seems spiritually buttressed by the fact he was born three months after Northern Ireland itself, in August 1921.

Yet Moore retains the tart flavour of a well-kept secret. He is not under-rated exactly, nor does he merit the backhanded compliment “writer’s writer” (unless the writer in question is Graham Greene, who called Moore his favourite living novelist). He is, rather, under-read and certainly under-kept-in-print: only about a third of