Books: Soul Trek Black Robe

The subject of Brian Moore’s 15th novel is the collision of Jesuits and Indians in 17th century North America, a story of hardship, faith and incompatibility. The Algonquin and Huron of what is now Canada regarded the priests as black-robed sorcerers overly concerned with death and water magic. The French missionaries saw “les Sauvages” as beastly innocents fated to burn in hell if they escaped baptism. Heaven was a hard sell because the Indians had no strong ideas about souls and paradise. As one of Moore’s intractable red men puts it, “It is because you Normans are deaf and blind that you think this world is a world of darkness and the world of the dead is a world of light.”

Trying to convert the past into fiction is no small act of faith either. The historical novelist must believe that he can be adequately inspired by old documents when, in fact, his imagination is better served by direct experience. Moore cites as his sources eyewitness reports and church records used by 19th century Historian Francis Parkman for his classic The Jesuits in North America. The novelist does not mention that it is hard to improve on this enthralling narrative, with its zealous clerics snatching souls from “the fangs of the ‘Infernal Wolf’ ” and its droll view of the New World. “These Canadian tribes,” wrote Parkman, “were undergoing that process of extermination, absorption, or expatriation, which, as there is reason to believe, had for many generations formed the gloomy and meaningless history of the greater part of this continent.”

Moore attempts to warm this chilly view with a sense of tragedy. His Father Laforgue is a composite of the passionate and courageous priests who followed Samuel de Champlain and the early fur trappers into the region. Laforgue’s assignment is to relieve a remote mission at Ihonatiria on the shores of Lake Huron. He and a young French assistant named Daniel must travel by canoe in the company of an Algonquin band that is the birchbark equivalent of a motorcycle gang.

The pagans are licentious and foul-mouthed. They despise the black robes but fear the white man’s power. They also covet the iron kettles, muskets and other trade goods the Europeans can provide in exchange for escort services. For the man of God, the journey is a trial of faith and a temptation in the wilderness. Each bend in the river holds new dangers to body and spirit: hunger, pestilence, raiding Iroquois and challenges hurled at Christianity by an Indian shaman.

Moore is an old pro, author of such surefooted novels as The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and The Luck of Ginger Coffey. But in Black Robe he slips between James Fenimore Cooper and Graham Greene, between a visually rich adventure yarn and lip service paid to human frailty and divine mercy. Nearly four-fifths of the novel is spent on the trail, providing the author with the simplest means of moving his story and creating suspense. The main test of wills occurs hastily in the last 50 pages and contains a solar eclipse that frightens off hostile Indians just as they are about to kill the black robes of Ihonatiria. Parkman’s history tells of a priest who knew enough astronomy to impress the natives with a prediction of an eclipse. Moore turns this event into a scene that belongs in the Movie of the Week.