LIES OF SILENCE
Brian Moore
New York: Doubleday, 1990
197 pp., $ 18.95
In every man's life there is a moment of decision that tests his mettle and yields his measure. For some, it comes after years of training, for others, before there has been a chance to prepare. Some face a moment of truth in public on a battlefield or in a boardroom; others within the family circle or in the still more private confines of their own hearts. But every man recognizes the challenge when he sees it and knows instinctively that failure to meet it will mark him.
Perhaps most men, at least in untried heroism of youth, hope that they will face staggering odds head-on, that, like Browning's Childe Roland, they will confront their nemesis undaunted, even if that confrontation be their undoing. Michael Dillon, the hero of Brian Moore's latest novel, Lies of Silence, is no exception. A thwarted poet, he has cherished, even in to early middle age, the hope that when tested, he would not be found wanting. When his moment of truth arrives, however, it is far more ambiguous than he had expected and demands a far higher price than he had prepared to pay.
Contemplating what will happen if he testifies against the IRA and identifies a young thug who held him and his wife hostage, he realizes that he is facing the single most decisive choice of his life:
The time had come. There had been no war in his life. He would never be called us as a soldier and put to the test of bravery in battle. He would never be asked to perform an act of heroism as a member of a resistance group. He had, instead, been put to the test by accident, a test he had every right to refuse. And yet … he knew that the moment … he told them he was afraid, he would lose forever something precious, something he had always taken for granted, some secret sense of his own worth.
The choice
Significantly, Michael's choice is intimately linked with Belfast, where he was born and raised; with his wife, Moira, whom he is planning to divorce; and with his unfulfilling job as manager of the Clarence Hotel. Describing himself as "a failed poet in a business suit," Michael believes that he has sold out, betraying his youthful aspirations. At thirty-eight, suffering from a premature mid-life crisis, he wants to escape from the city, the marriage, and the job that have helped to make him what he is. Unfortunately, he fails to realize that the real culprits are the faulty choices that he has made himself.
As the novel opens, Michael is poised at a critical juncture in his life. He can either stay with his wife in Belfast or strike out for freedom in London with his Canadian-born lover, Andrea Baxter. This choice, however, entails much more than he realizes. As Moore shows, the "simple" question of whether to leave Moira and Ireland is really immensely complicated. If Dillon stays, he will lose that part of himself that had always wanted to be somebody in the "larger world," free from the small-town asperities of Belfast. But if he goes, Moore seems to suggest, Michael will lose the chance to find out who he really is. Although he isn't
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