No Other Life
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- USD 8.99
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- USD 8.99
Descripción editorial
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'In this explosive book Moore brings a world pulsating to life, with vivid descriptive writing and a series of beautifully accurate vignettes' - Financial Times
'Tightly-made and absorbing. Brian Moore is a highly intelligent writer who has the enviable ability to make you want to go on turning the pages... this is a very exciting book' - A. N. Wilson, Evening Standard
'The profundity of this book is achieved with breathtaking lightness... Moore can push the reader's mind against its own extremities' - Guardian
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When Father Paul Michel, a missionary on the desperately poor Caribbean island of Ganae, plucks a black child from abject poverty, he does not expect the boy to become a charismatic Catholic priest and outspoken revolutionary. Jeannot, as Father Paul calls him, is a messianic orator who bravely urges his black brethren to rise against their oppressors. At odds with the Vatican in Rome, he is expelled from his order only to emerge as the first democratically elected president of the volatile Ganae.
Antagonising the mulatto elite and the ruling military junta, Jeannot discovers his enemies will stop at nothing - assassination, arson, brutal repression - to destroy him. Even Father Paul, who tells this story, is unsure whether Jeannot is saint or tyrant. In this deeply unsettling novel, Brian Moore weighs immortal souls against mortal misery.
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'Poised, bracing and moving... if pleasure indeed corrupts the soul, then this very novel is a twenty-four carat sin' - Independent
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a work as compelling as his Booker-shortlisted Lies of Silence , Moore tells a swift, spellbinding tale of faith and politics that is plainly based on recent events in Haiti, whose priest/president Aristide is still in exile. The priest/president of Moore's fictional Ganae is Jeannot, a brilliant black boy plucked from rural poverty by the Canadian missionary who tells the story. Jeannot becomes a highly charismatic priest, draws an enormous following from among the poor and becomes enmeshed, inevitably, in island politics as an outspoken enemy of the corrupt army, the mulatto elite, drug dealers and American business interests. As a priest, he also becomes embroiled with Rome (since, as a cynical fellow priest remarks, ``Liberation theology is out of date. This is a capitalist world and we have to live in it.'') The issue of whether a priest has a duty to help the poor in their material lives or simply to concentrate on their immortal souls is at the heart of the novel, but it is by no means a didactic affair; for one thing, Jeannot is created with real passion. Written with great speed and economy, but with a strikingly brooding atmosphere, the narrative hastens to an enigmatic and mournful conclusion. This is the best writing Moore has done in many years, and certainly bears comparison with that other 20th-century classic about Haiti, Graham Greene's The Comedians.
