A Greene thought in a Greene shade
David Profumo
THE COLOUR OF BLOOD by Brian Moore
Cape, £10.95
The due balance of economy and real- ism is surely one of the chief touchstones of literary fiction, and there is nothing so irksome as the experience of an author shoving at his reader a surplus of detail in the supposed interests of verisimilitude. In this respect, the contemporary 'thriller' is often lacking in subtlety, leaving the reader little space to exercise his imagination in the face of head-to-toe descriptions of every character, and incidental treatises on the price of frqit or the specific extras on a type of motor-car.
Brian Moore has never been accused of such over-writing, and his latest novel is a thriller that positively thrives on a certain vagueness of detail that forces the reading eye to supply much of the background colour. Mr Moore is no doubt tired by now of comparisons with Graham Greene, but the result is remarkably similar to that remote and yet involving style that came to light in The Tenth Man.
Cardinal Stephen Bem is the spiritual primate of a small Soviet bloc state where religion is attracting a powerful number of supporters. At the start of the book he is seen narrowly to escape an attempted assassination, and is taken off to protective custody by a squad of the country's security police in order to ensure that his concilia- tory views about the balance between church and state can safely be voiced at a major religious festival the following week.
Although he is essentially a good Christ- ian, and one who has tried to strike a balance between the autonomy of his faith and the safety of his people, Bem believes himself to be an unworthy leader and this view is shared by certain factions of the Catholic church. At the forthcoming jubilee celebration of martyrs at Rywald, his outspoken subordinate Archbishop Krasnoy is planning an inflammatory speech calling on the unions to stage a strike in protest against the government, a course of action that the primate does not endorse. He therefore resents his 'arrest', and determines to escape in order to assert his authority.
After several attempts, Bern eludes his captors and takes to the road, becoming one of those ordinary citizens from which his years in a position of ecclesiastical elevation have distanced him. A hunted man who does not understand the rules of the chase, he becomes a stranger in a strange land; divested of his badges of office (the scarlet robes to which the title alludes), he experiences again 'the under- side of our state', a world of displaced persons for whom the notions of trust and charity are not qualities to be taken for granted.
The storyline takes on a new urgency when the Cardinal discovers that his cap- tors were not the SP (or 'raincoats', as they are known), but impostors from some extremist group within his own church.
Unsure of whether he is now on the run from the government, a conspiracy of his own bishops, a CIA-backed terrorist group, or a plot initiated by the Soviets in a bid to shuffle the political pack, Bern begins to doubt all the certainties upon which his spiritual career has been found- ed. The third-person narrative dips unpre- dictably into the confessional mode as he realises, perhaps too late, that he is ill- equipped to become as suspicious and political as the circumstances require for his survival.
By eschewing any turbulent psychology and playing down the evident traumas of the primate's reversal of roles, Moore achieves a sense of menace more surely than other writers, since he will not state the obvious. The partial bewilderment of the displaced leader is effectively mirrored in the gaps that he preserves in the information we are fed, which not only maintain the narrative tension with a mini- mum of authorial exertion but also gener- ate a successful aura of vulnerability around the hero, a man gradually rising to the true challenge of his vocation.
Lonely in the crowd, practically invisible among his people, Bem begins to see them as they really are. Moore does not trade in any of the stereotypes of thrillerdom here; policemen do not leer suspiciously through cigarette smoke at every roadblock — they are more interested in the latest soccer results — and Communists chat about the weather, and put their hands up for second helpings. Precisely because it is in one sense a 'thriller', it would be unfair to deal at greater length with the plot of this enthralling book. As might be expected, it enjoys a crystal clear style of prose that discourages any attempt to hurry through the pages, it is one of those novels that seems to be precisely the right length (in this case 182 pages) for its own burden, and there is not an ugly sentence to be seen.
The prose is remarkably free of figurative or allusive language — shorn, in fact, of anything that would prove at odds with the fugitive mentality — and the human dilem- ma on which it centres is a triumphant success. As an excursion into the field of human duplicity and strength, it manages to be that rare thing, a spiritual thriller.
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