FERGUS

by Brian Moore ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 14, 1970

Fergus Fadden is another one of Brian Moore's scriveners, a decade older than Brendan Tierney and looking for a different Answer from Limbo (1962)--in other words one of those might-have-been-has-beens on the ""westward slope."" At the moment, having left his wife and shacked up with a miniskirted twenty-two-year-old, he's in Hollywood doing, and re-doing, a script. He is also assailed by doubts of all kinds as various apparitions--his parents, an aunt, a priest, etc., etc.--materialize and he looks for some easement and assurance of an afterlife they do not give him. For although he has fallen away, he knows that the ""grammar of his emotions"" has been shaped by his family as well as the faith he can't quite jettison even if he has broken every article thereof. Eventually he is invaded more and more by the past, encircled and accused. Mr. Moore handles these transitions quite remarkably as the unreal becomes real and terrifying. It is not his strongest book but it is furrowed here and there with alt the gentle, sad, comic recognitions which redeem Moore's lapsed lost souls on the outskirts of failure.

Pub Date: Sept. 14, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION