"That's the feeling," says Moore. "There's a calm and you say, 'Right, that's over. Now, I'm going to start something else.' "
There's an old Irish notion: More books are destroyed in bars by talk than are ever written. So Moore won't be talking about the new one.
Well, maybe just a little. It's quite different from the last three, no surprise there, though it also deals with "a very political thing -- corruption. People come to power with the best of motives, but begin to see an image of themselves which is false and then believe the image. It's the voice of a man discovering about himself things that he didn't know were true."
At 70, Moore doesn't allow himself much in the way of looking back. He doesn't reread his books -- he knows the bad parts ("I'm not a masochist!") -- and for him retirement seems a synonym for nightmare. When it's suggested that he has a body of work that would give him the right to sit out on the patio staring at the sea for the rest of his days, he says with a characteristic earnestness and just a hint of irritation: "I'm not satisfied because I don't write the books to make them a body of work; I write the books to keep me interested. And I write the next book because I'm happy when I'm doing it."
Unhappy when not doing it, in other words. And with age, moreover, come new fears: "The thought of having a failing heart or a stroke or something, and not being able to write, that's very terrifying for me. I know I won't be happy just sitting."
But, he adds, a requisite for him has been a certain optimism, a feeling that he could go on and write another book. Luckily, it's a feeling he's had since he started writing novels. It carries him forward -- that and the ambition that got him here in the first place.
"Every novelist, including every great novelist, writes several books, and the strange thing is that perhaps only one or two of those books will live. The novelist never knows which one is going to live. And the thing that probably keeps the novelist going is that he or she might not have written that book yet. And you just wonder, have I written that book or have I missed that book or will I someday write that book?
"I've always had this in mind: If I could only write one book that would last 50 or 60 years or maybe longer, my whole life would have been really worthwhile."
"The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne" has been in print nearly 40 years. But, to use the last words of "The Great Victorian Collection," "The extent to which it will outlive the man who created it, or its interest to succeeding generations, is, of course, beyond the range of our predictions."
So, too, is Brian Moore's interest to this generation.
