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Sat 11 Nov 2002Essential reading for pleasureBIOGRAPHY: In a short note on "The Pleasure of Reading" written in 1992, the Belfast-born novelist Brian Moore identified three books from his teenage years that greatly influenced him.The Faber Book of Modern Verse, the original edition of Michael Roberts’s anthology "which became for me, as for many of my generation, our introduction to Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane and others". Joyce’s Ulysses, which Moore borrowed from a cousin who had "smuggled it in from Paris" and which he (Moore) never returned. And The Sun Also Rises: "At the age of eighteen," Moore recalls, "I lay one day [c.1939] on top of Cave Hill, the mountain which overlooks my native city. I was reading The Sun Also Rises, lost in Hemingway’s perfect evocation of a Spanish bullfight fiesta and the Left Bank café life of expatriates in the 1920s. I realised that Jake Barnes, like Stephen Dedalus, was a writer of sorts and that both were half in love with lands which were not their own. Looking back now I think that reading these two books formed my desire to leave Ireland and become a writer. Which I did." Indeed he did. Twenty novels from The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955) to The Magician’s Wife (1997), along with some money-making pulp fiction under a pseudonym, and one novel under way before his death in 1999 at the age of 77. As Patricia Craig informs us in this neat, fluent and clear-sighted biography, Moore’s 21st novel was "based on Rimbaud’s life in Africa". That note on "The Pleasure of Writing" tells us much about the contours of Moore’s life, which Patricia Craig has shaped into a coherent, uncomplicated and moving narrative. Her understanding of Moore’s professionalism as a writer does not cloud her critical insight into the artistic achievement of his writing. Often patronised as a good "story teller", Craig’s very readable book suggests why there is much more bite to Moore than this cliché. The Moore family background is sketched in without fuss – the typical mix of Northern hybridity (a mother from Cresslough in Donegal, father from Co Antrim with Presbyterian forebears); the middle-class Catholic upbringing in north Belfast and the social world radiating from north to west to south to Dublin to Moore’s famous nationalist uncle, Eoin MacNeill. (Not the "300-odd miles" from Belfast to here, it should be noted!) The schooling at St Malachy’s Grammar School becomes a bug-bear so that when the young Moore fails a university entrance exam he decides to uproot himself and leave Belfast and so, in his early 20s, he is on "his way to North Africa with the [Allied] troops".