Sad and beautiful: The Dear Departed, by Brian Moore, reviewed

Short story writers often find it irksome to be asked when the novel is coming out, as though their work was just rookie preparation for something more substantial. (That said, many do go on to write that novel.) The Dear Departed is, amazingly, the first selection of Brian Moore’s short stories to be published. Written between 1953 and 1961, they prefigure most of Moore’s 20 highly acclaimed novels, three of which were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

One can certainly appreciate how the stories of this collection display the concerns that would preoccupy the Belfast-born Moore throughout his career — those attempts to abandon the values and constraints of the past, to escape conservative, authoritarian homes. ‘No other postmark can compete in authority with the place of one’s birth. It is what we fled: it may, at any time, reach up to reclaim us,’ observes the wannabe Rimbaud of the final story, ‘Preliminary Pages for a Work of Revenge’.

But leaving aside any relationship to future output, these are, simply, great stories. In ‘Uncle T’, a young Irish emigrant and his bride find that the ‘publishing’ job offered by a relative and his wife in New York is not all it seems. The story is deft, nuanced and notable in the way it elicits sympathy for all four main characters. And the feelings of a woman torn between her departed son and dead husband are handled with great delicacy in the quietly compelling ‘Grief for the Dear Departed’.

In ‘Off the Track’ a sociologist and his wife on a trip to Haiti are disappointed by the American-style hotel and its tourist voodoo show. They want to photograph the ‘real’ country, but Moore has them end up morally uncomfortable, reluctant voyeurs.