Black Robe

One of the most admired and imaginative of contemporary novelists, Brian Moore has a genius for taking possession of whatever subject he touches. And never more so than in this breathtaking tale of a Jesuit priest in the wilderness of seventeenth-century Canada, moving into unsuspected regions of terror and heroism.

It was a time when the French laid claim to everything, but in truth the wilderness that was Canada belonged to the natives. Theirs was a world wholly foreign to the Jesuit fathers, who came, along with the soldiers and fur trappers, from the Old World to New France. A gulf existed that could never be bridged. The Jesuits saw the Savages (as they called them) as souls to be saved. The natives saw the Blackrobes (as they called them) as destroyers, threatening the gods, dreams, and sorceries by which they ordered their lives.

Out of that conflict—whose echoes still reverberate—between two cultures, two races, two worlds, Brian Moore has fashioned an extraordinary novel. The Jesuit Father Laforgue, setting forth on a mission that may end in torture and death, sustained by faith and a dream of martyrdom, is portrayed with uncanny sympathy and understanding; so too the Algonkins, with whom he travels deep into the wilderness and who abandon him to his fate.

There is ferocity here and unsparing realism, as the truth requires, and a belief in the ultimate transcendence of the human spirit. Black Robe enlightens and enthralls.