The Great Victorian Collection - Brian Moore

Brian Moore is a difficult writer to pin down - and it's literally decades since the time I was reading him - but there are at least a few constants which you can easily associate with his Belfast, Northern Ireland background, his characters often struggling with Catholic guilt when confronted with events that challenge their beliefs in who they think they are. Those are more evident in his earlier books located in Ireland, but living in Canada his works gradually acquired a wider and less easily definable character (although I remember those themes still being to the forefront in Black Robe), and a wider popular readership leading to a number of major film adaptations. One book which is harder to reconcile with anything else in his writing - other than the nature of writing itself - is The Great Victorian Collection.

The premise clearly lays out what is in essence a very intriguing idea, but one you would think has limited scope to develop. Anthony Maloney, an assistant professor of history at a university in Montreal while on a visit to the USA on a stopover at a motel in Carmel, California, has a strange dream about Victorian antiques and wakes up one morning to find that there in the large parking lot, laid out in rows, is a fabulous collection of beautiful Victorian objects. They look authentic, some never before seen outside of book descriptions, others exact replicas of supposedly one-off antiques in private collections. Somehow Tony knows he willed them into being and claims ownership, but that's a harder thing to explain to the owner of the hotel, the journalists who ask questions and indeed the police.

It's a very surreal idea for a novel, and after it sets out this premise in the first chapter, you are intrigued to wonder where it could possibly go from here. It doesn't come across as the kind of book you expect from the author of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and Black Robe, or indeed Moore's previous book Catholics, but even those examples are sufficiently different in approach and show the wide variety of Moore's writing. You can't take anything for granted with Brian Moore.

What immediately comes to mind as the point of the work, since it has a theme less anchored in reality, is that it is clearly allegorical. The most obvious suggestion is that it is a metaphor for writing; the dreaming of an idea, imagining the details, creating it, putting it out to the world and being concerned about how it will be accepted and how the wrong kind of attention can tarnish the wonder of the creation. But wrapped up within that there are obviously wider implications and commentary about how people behave when confronted with the unknown in art, and how it, beauty and commerce can have an uneasy relationship.

It's nicely observed, even if it does seem somewhat heavy-handed at making the metaphor obvious. Tony's mother is concerned about him giving up a good job at the university for a dream that no one will take seriously. A spiritualist is like an editor who believes in him, a publicist promises a lecture tour and a lot of money, and all sorts of other people want to be part of the journey, hoping it's not a one-off and that Tony might have another dream. Even the hidden erotica found in a secret compartment that he is a little embarrassed about ties in with the content of Moore's own works.

Just like anyone who writes about writing or makes films about making films, The Great Victorian Collection risks becoming a little self-indulgent and the metaphors can only be stretched so far, but even if many of the figures seem like caricatures Moore keeps it interesting. Despite the apparent limitations of the situation and how far it can be pushed, there is actually a lot to consider; the fear of writers block in being unable to dream, the fear of being revealed as a fraud, the concern about one's abilities weakening and losing the gift, the impact that fame and celebrity has on your personal life, the unknown of how your legacy will be viewed in the future. Somehow, despite the strangeness of the metaphor, Moore manages to keep it grounded in an emotional and personal reality and indeed, long after he had left his collection behind it seems there are still people considering and writing about it.

Reading notes: The Great Victorian Collection by Brian Moore was first published in 1975. I had read a lot of Brian Moore back in the day, and met him on a couple of occasions at book signings in the Queens Bookshop in Belfast, but his back catalogue was hard to track down back then, and you were reliant on the occasional book turning up in second hand bookshops. I had never been able to trace a copy of The Great Victorian Collection while I was working through his works, so couldn't resist picking up a secondhand 1977 Penguin paperback copy that I found recently while in Wexford (Red Books - an absolute treasure trove of a bookshop). Moore is another author I'm keen to revisit. I'll be on the lookout for more of his work.