276
JOHN GOODE
STAGE LEFT
THE REVOLUTION SCRIPT. By Brien Moore. Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
$6.95.
The blurb insensitively places
The Revolution Script
"in the
tradition of'
In Cold Blood,
giving the impression that Brian Moore's
book cashes in on a fashion ("tradition" is surely flagrant ) created
by Capote's success.
If
there is any literary opportunism, however, it is
irrelevant to the book's importance and success: except for the con–
flation of fiction and journalism, the two works couldn't be more
different. In the first place, the factual basis of Moore's book is of a
totally different order from that of Capote!s. The kidnapping of the
British Trade Commissioner and the murder of the Labor Minister
of Quebec by cells of the Front de Liberation du Quebec in 1970
were globally interesting events: the protagonists of the whole drama
included the Canadian Premier; the last act was televised live. Its
political implications were irrunediately visible -behind the crime,
everybody at once recognized "the Quebec question." The Clutter
murders were, in comparison, local news: the victims were ordinary,
the killers pathological, the crime "a psychological accident." What–
ever political significance that tragedy had lay deep below the surface,
made evident perhaps only by the ironic undertow of inevitability that
the creation of a fiction out of it generates. By contrast, Moore has it
made - there is no unknown to question, only a determining social
situation to exhibit. At the same time, the FLQ action has its draw–
backs as fictional material. The private tragedy of the Clutters has no
.problems of duration: six years elapse between the crime and the pub-
lication of Capote's book without loss of impact, for it is
a
story of
"modern" America. Brian Moore's subject
is
the
Canadian event of
1970: its immediate importance means that it has duration only in his–
tory books, which abstractly assess its cause and effects in a complex
process. The book has appeared soon after the event, as though sensing
its fragile topicality.
A straight comparison is unfair, however, precisely because
The
Revolution Script
is
alert to all these factors, and creatively responsive
to them. It
is
about what it says it is about - "revolution" acknowledges
the ready-made historicity of the events; "script" suggests both that it is
a project for a revolution, rather than the event itself, and that it is a
