210
JOHN GOODE
I'm saying no more than that the liberal outlook and the imaginative
sympathy wrestle with one another, or, in other words, that it is a
novelist's book.
So
far, then, from it being a merely occasional work,
The Revolu–
tion Script
seems to me to be the product of a continuous concern in
Moore's work with
nous autres
and the potentialities of liberation
within an urban and highly controlled world. Beyond that, it seems
to me to be an important development. Moore tends to be described
as an efficient but unadventurous realist, but his novels portray a much
more problematic relationship between subject and object than this
suggests. The sharply observed facts of contiguous existence are normally
highly orchestrated in his world, so that a relatively small number of
objects and people accrue significance as obstacles in the mind of the
protagonist in
his
usually thwarted, often unwilling journey toward
self-assertion: a precarious identity is maintained by contractual cliches
as much as by an environment or a social group and at the same time
incarcerated by them. The novels of the fifties tended to portray a
flickering outburst of self-begotten vitality followed by a devastated
accommodation.
The Emperor of Ice Cream
J
however, charted an
escape, and the novels which followed it,
I Am Mary Dunne
and
Fergus
J
both have escaped protagonists. Curiously, they do little but
confront their past, which keeps asserting itself as a reality in the fairy–
tale world of theit new life (rich New York, paradisal California). In
Fergus
J
even the chairs hang in the air; other characters
talk
to a
deaf hero, himself carrying on internal battles with the past from which
he has broken.
I Am Mary Dunne
is a very fine novel, but perhaps
because the heroine is as oppressed in her new social world as in that
she escapes: Mary is no longer Dunne, she is a much named object
of male sexual curiosity. But in
Fergus
J
the real has become entirely
internal, subject only to the vagaries of memory: its hero has no pre–
sent, and the inexplicable affirmation at the end seems pointless. Clearly
the inadequate victim, Judith or Devine or Ginger, is an expendable
vessel for the reality of Montreal or Belfast. But Mary and Fergus seem
to have no radically different relationship with it: they have been re–
leased, not liberated. Emigration does not change it, but merely tries
to shut it out.
The Revolution Script
not merely breaks away from
that rather unbalanced introspective mode by celebrating the inter–
connections between separate consciousnesses, but succeeds in dramatizing
the interaction of those minds with the theater they choose to seek their
liberation in. We watch the FLQ making an assault on their lives made
