Customer Reviews

Black Robe

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you want to be known for writing a great novel in the historical fiction genre, you must do three things. First you must be able to tell a good story. This one is about a French Jesuit priest in 1643 Quebec, who decides to go on a lengthy and arduous journey--in perhaps the most desolate, dangerous land in the world--to assist in the conversion of the heathen savages. Accompanied by members of the Algonkian tribe, he participates in their strenuous canoe journey down the river, is tormented by illness and by the savages' (the author's word) sorcerer, gets lost, witnesses their hunting and camping rituals, is captured and tortured by another tribe, escapes, and finally gets to his destination. If this kind of thing doesn't boil your blood, well, go ahead and read Proust.

Second, you must be historically accurate. Not only do you not wish to have your readers throw your book at the wall with disgust, but more importantly, you want your readers to come away from their experience with an understanding of a time and place which to some degree was previously unknown to them. This book accomplishes this down to the tiniest detail. We see how the savages dress, what they eat, how they eat it, how they camp at night, how they speak with each other, and how women and children are treated in their little society. We learn what motivates them spiritually and realize that the conditions under which they lived had an effect on their beliefs. Beyond this, we get to know them individually, with their all too human quirks and foibles, and we come to feel empathy for them. They are real to us; we respond to them emotionally.

The Jesuit priest is no less expertly drawn. He is so devoted to his Catholic religion that he reacts with an almost . . . excitement towards the prospect of dying for it; to him he would become a martyr. But his chosen way of life comes with its own problems: he is not capable of handling his own sexuality or the sexuality of others, and reacts to these events in a guilty, fearful, and indecisive manner. The savages consider him weak and foolish, and in many ways he is. But we also are shown his strength, and unwavering sense of purpose.

If, as a novelist, you are able to accomplish the above, you will have authored an excellent piece of fiction. But in order to write a truly outstanding novel, you must accomplish one more thing: the transcendence of the subject matter into universal human themes. In this case, the clash of two complex and utterly divergent cultures and their juxtaposition with each other gives us a new understandings of both. To the savages, baptism is "water sorcery;" to the savages, praying over beads is putting a curse on someone; to the savages, eating the flesh of a dead God in a solitary room is simply foolish; and to the savages, the concept of one God is ridiculous. Of course to the Jesuits the savages appear barbaric, with their sorcerers, superstitions, and bloodthirsty ways.

Interestingly, in the harsh environment of the wilderness, the white men find it harder and harder to maintain their faith; indeed, the white companion of the Jesuit father apparently abandons his. But at the same time, in the face of the "Black Robe's" unrelenting faith, the promise of goods to come to them, and the reworking of their own superstitions, the savages begin to move away from their own beliefs.

This is not lengthy book nor in any way difficult to understand. Yet it is so well-researched, so understated, and so perfectly realized, that we come away from it with a truly new understanding of a fascinating time of history, an understanding of a foreign way of life, and a clearer understanding of our own culture and ourselves.

A deep, disturbing, thoughtful novel of New France, the very early years of what we now call Canada. A Jesuit priest, or Black Robe as he was called by the Native Americans, heads into the wilderness with some Algonquin guides to reach a mission for the Hurons near the shores of Lake Huron, so deep into the endless and treacherous forest. His life and faith begin to disintegrate in his first harsh experiences in the New World, and his first close and bewildering encounters with the Native Americans and their utterly different culture. Moore writes a lot like Graham Greene and his subject matter is often similar, too. Both are masters of the modern journalistic style of story-telling -- taut, concise, crisp, polished. This is a wonderful read and a insistent meditation on faith and hope, as well as a vivid portrait of an almost unknown part of the North American past. By the way, Bruce Beresford made this into a fine movie -- actually a great movie. It's not often that a director manages that feat. The film is a bit different, even though it is scrupulously faithful to Moore's original plot. I would say that the book is much the better, just because it is so much deeper and fuller, but the film is not to be missed either. Here is a modern author who really thinks and feels the impulses of religion and spirituality in the human soul. Enjoy.

Too bad this one can't be rated higher than 5-stars. I first read this one back in the 80s, then seeing the movie. I have both the hardcover edition and the DVD. That's how good I feel this material to be.

This book caused me to track down Francis Parkman's writing on France & England in the new world. Later caused me to purchase a few books on Father DeSmet and his work with the western Indian tribes. Though Fenimore Cooper's writings overstated the case of the last of the Mohicans, this writing on the Huron really does document the end of the Hurons as a people.

Don't know if anyone will be interested in this review this late after this book has passed its prime.

But reading on the Huron experience and the Black Robes stays with me both as interesting historical experience, and enjoyable reading. If you combine the book with the VHS or DVD, the visual aspects make the material more imprinted on your mind.

Though Brian Moore is deceased, his works, especially this one, live on. Hopefully many people will yet be interested in this one.

Highly recomended.

Semper Fi.

In the introduction to his novel, 'Black Robe', Brian Moore says he got his factual information from a collection of letters that the Jesuit missionaries sent home from early Quebec. That's fortunate since his portrayal of the Iroquois and other Amerinds of the 17-century would otherwise seem slanderous.

For those who aren't familiar with the plot, Father Laforgue - a Jesuit misssionary - is sent by his house on a journey from Quebec up the St. Lawrence to the Huron territory in the early 17th century. He is to replace another priest at the misson there who may have been killed. He travels by canoe with a group of Algonquin who have been charged with his protection by Samuel Champlain. Along the journey, he is abandoned by most of the Algonquin, and he and his remaining companions are captured by the Iroquois. After escaping, he finally reaches his destination.

I came to the novel via the film, and, despite the brutality protrayed in it, the director left out the most graphic scenes. Rather than simply killing Chomina's 10-year-old son, the Iroquois cook and eat the child in front of his father and sister. Father Laforgue masturbates when he stumbles on Daniel and Anuka mating in the forest. Anuka performs oral sex upon another Frenchman - who has gone native - in front of Daniel. The translation of the Amerinds' speech is as filled with scatological terms as that of a contemporary teenager (which makes them sound perversely modern). The Algonquin allow their children to have sex with each other and with the Frenchmen.

Obviously, Laforgue finds all of this more than shocking and has trouble maintaining his faith in face of such insults to his beliefs. When he finally reaches the Huron village, he has been traumatized to the extent that he can no longer feel the fervor that first inspired him. In this, the film departs from the novel by suggesting that Laforgue never wavers from his convictions.

Moore has portrayed a moment in history in which deep beliefs clash in mutual incomprehension. As the Huron elder says to Father Laforgue: "I was a good friend to Andehoua [another Jesuit], and it grieves me that he was killed. But listen, Blackrobe. I am speaking against you today. You and your god do not suit our people. Your ways are not our ways. If we adopt them we will be neither Norman nor Huron. And soon our enemies will know our weaknesses and wipe us from the earth". But the ways that the elder is defending include cannibalism and wife-abandonment. And the Amerind society of the time had no place for the sick, the weak, the deformed, the crippled, or the very old. A culture without pity since pity is one of the weaknesses to which the elder refered.

The late lamented Bian Moore often inhabited worlds where graham greene had become master{though Moore was not very far behind.} The world of moral ambiguities,the world that we live in. In Black Robe he takes this to another level, telling the tragic story of the Jesuit missions to Canada and the Huron. It tells the story of a zealous,pious younf Jesuit,his assistant, and the native people who help them. Loosely based on the life of Jean de Brebouf{who pened the famous Chrstmas carol,the huron carol and suffered an unbelievable,torturous death},young Fr.Laforgue,who is woefully prepared for this stumbles into one situation after another.His zeal,though, becomes tempered by compasion,and his character is not one dimensional.Eventuallly, he is abandoned and finds the huron mission he set out for, leaving the then village of quebec all those miles and deaths ago. the viloence is quite graphic[including the death of a child which stayed with me for some time}.the ending,where lafaogue finds the village sick with fever,agreeing to be baptized if the Blackrobes wil cure them.The ending is chilling and superb and all the more so since it actually happened.One of Moore's best,which says a great deal.

Discussing Black Robe, the author said, "...I'd never written a book like this before. I didn't want to write an historical novel because I don't particularly like historical novels... I wanted to write this as a tale. I thought of it in terms of authors I admire, like Conrad. I thought of Heart of Darkness, a tale, a journey into an unknown destination, to an unknown ending." He was inspired to write Black Robe through his own experience of the vast Canadian landscape, the severe winter climate, and his own travels up and down the St. Lawrence River. His discovery of American historian Francis Parkman's study entitled "The Jesuits in North America" led Moore on a quest of further research, and soon he began to wonder... what if he had been fool enough to become a Jesuit and land himself in this Canadian wilderness, surrounded by people who seemed highly intelligent and terrifying all at once, and near impossible to convert? Black Robe was born.

It is set in the early seventeenth century. The zealous Jesuit missionary Father Laforgue must make a perilous journey up the Ottawa River to a remote outpost in order to to relieve an ailing priest of his duties there. After receiving permission from the Commandant, who is none other than Samuel Champlain, Laforgue sets off for Ihonatiria with his young apprentice Daniel Davost, and a convoy of canoes piloted by the native Algonkin guides. The trip proves to be even more perilous than was anticipated and Moore's tale becomes an experiment in bringing the character of the committed priest Laforgue to the limits of his beliefs and his ability to endure. And it pains him to watch Daniel's own spiritual disintegration.

This tale is superb in how it shows the clash of these two almost infinitely different cultures... the European Christian (and more specifically "Catholic") proselytizing mentality face to face with the Native belief in harmony with nature. One of the "Savages" sums up their opinion of Laforgue by saying "...listen Blackrobe. I am speaking against you today. You and your god do not suit our people. Your ways are not our ways. If we adopt them we will be neither Norman nor Huron. And soon our enemies will know our weakness and wipe us from the earth." These natives live by relying on the interpretation of their dreams and by the forest speaking to them etc., things which the Jesuits considered useless or foolish, and a result of ignorance. But Moore is brilliant in showing how the natives saw the Jesuit ways as being equally mysterious and ridiculous (especially the whole idea of the Eucharist, how they viewed it as cannibalism. They called baptism the "water sorcery"). So everything about the natives that seemed to be based on a sort of primitive superstition was reciprocated in their perception of Jesuit practises and rituals. In this book we meet the Huron, the Iroquois, and the Algonkin as a handsome, brave, warlike, incredibly cruel people, who were in no way dependent on the white man and, in fact, judged him to be their physical and mental inferior. And we meet the Blackrobes, who willingly flung themselves into the midst of this culture, and unlike Conrad's exploitive colonialists, came not for the purpose of economic and political conquest, but for religious conversion of those whom they called "the Savages."
One textual note: There is an immense amount of profanity in Black Robe, enough to warn the sqeamish about. According to the author's preface, the obscene language used by the natives at that time in history was a form of rough banter and was not intended to give offense.

When Brian Moore died on January 11th of this year (1999), we lost one of our best serious novelists. Without succumbing to gargantuism (his novels are generally under 300 pages) or obscurantism (the stories are pretty straightforward & the linguistic pyrotechnics are minimal) or fishing for a best seller, he managed to produce novels that are both thrilling and thought provoking.

In Black Robe he describes a journey by two Jesuits in 17th century Canada on a mission to relieve a dying priest. With considerable empathy and insight, he portrays Father Paul Laforgue's near-suicidal longing to be a martyr for Christ; the sexual torment of young Daniel Davost, Laforgue's protege who has been seduced by a native girl; and the mixture of superstitious fear and hatred that they provoke in the native tribes. The action that ensues when these two white men come in contact with the natives, will test all of their beliefs. As Moore describes it in his Introduction:

the Indian belief in a world of night and in the power of dreams clashed with the Jesuits' preachments of Christianity and a paradise after death. This novel is an attempt to show that each of these beliefs inspired in the other fear, hostility, and despair, which later would result in the destruction and abandonment of the Jesuit missions, and the conquest of the Huron people by the Iroquois, their deadly enemy.

Moore states his own case a little too pessimistically, the clash of cultures that he presents is indeed brutal, but it is not futile. In the novel's closing scene, Laforgue who has despaired of his own worthiness to be a martyr, despite withstanding torture, abandonment by Davost and the murder of the priest they came to replace, agrees to baptize native villagers who are being ravaged by the plague; not necessarily because he believes that their conversion is genuine or that it will save them, but simply because he loves them and because, finally, he believes that God loves them all. Despite the brutality and destructiveness of these initial encounters between the Blackrobes and the Indians, it is this ethos of Christian love that eventually won the day and brought civilization to Canada and its native population. I know it's not a popular thing to say, but...that's a good thing.

GRADE: B+

Jesuit Father Paul Laforgue comes to 17th century Quebec to serve God by converting the Savages who live in pre-Christian darkness deep in the hinterlands of French North America. The Father comes fully prepared to live out his life among the heathen of this New World, in order to save their souls and die for Christ in the process if he must. But he is not prepared for the journey he must take to the mission of Ihonitaria to replace the suffering Fathers, who have already staked out Christ's claim among the Huron nation there.

Brian Moore superbly portrays the meeting of two cultures in this novel of shared incomprehension, as the French Fathers seek to remake the native North Americans in their image while the natives obdurately resist the men they see as Black Robe sorcerers, while struggling, at the same time, to find accommodation with the French adventurers who have brought these Fathers into their midst. The French, of course, have a host of wonderful new things to offer the North Americans and the temptation of their goods has opened the Indians to the inroads of Black Robes like Laforgue.

For his part, Father Laforgue means only good for these people as he struggles with his own crisis of faith during a journey he must make into the country's interior, in the company of a party of skeptical Algonkin Indians. The Algonkins fear and misunderstand the Father just as he fails to grasp their own unique way of seeing the world and the journey of these people becomes a calvary both for Laforgue and for some of the Algonkins as they pass deeper into the country of the Algonkin's deadly enemy, the Iroquois.

Moore has conjured up a picture of the meeting of these peoples that is vividly compelling and repellent by turns. Moore's Jesuit Father is no more prepared for the closeness of the accommodations he must share with the Savages, their sexual mores, personal habits or worldview, than they are prepared for his promises of a paradise beyond death if they will only give up the life they know. Nor is the good Father ready for the wanton savagery he must withstand when he finally encounters the wilder and fiercer Iroqouis who live in the land between the French settlements and the Huron Indians of Ihonitaria towards which they travel.

I found myself a bit surprised by Moore's rendering of the Indians' speech, giving them a coarse slang that mimicked some of our own worst 'cuss words' but the overall effect he achieved was actually quite powerful. If they really didn't speak this way, I was, by the tale's end, convinced that they did. And this Father Laforgue proves a redoubtable adventurer in his own right, though he is fundamentally a timid man, more suited to a parish priesthood than the trials of a Christian martyr.

Overall, Moore's rendering is both convincing and moving by turns, as Father Laforgue must find his faith again despite all the trials he has witnessed and endured. Nor is it entirely clear, at the end, that he has truly found it. But what he has found is a passion to complete the work he began and a conviction, in the deepest part of his soul, that his life belongs with the harsh, heathen people who have nearly destroyed his body and his faith.

SWM
author of The King of Vinland's Saga

This is a fascinating and gripping portrait of a Jesuit priest on a journey to a Huron mission in New France. Moore does well in contrasting the alien cultures of the Algonkin and the French. Both sets of values are taken seriously, and ultimately it is sacrificial love that offers hope that the cultural chasm can be bridged. While the Jesuit's journey does challenge his faith, it does not destroy it. Please note that this book does contain explicit sexual scenes and foul language. The sex scenes are not meant to titillate but to develop moral and cultural conflicts, and the foul language is used because that is how the Algonkin talked. This book would not be appropriate for high school libraries.

I was originally assigned the book as a project for school, and decided I would just watch the movie, but I was captivated by the story and just had to read the novel.

Some parts are like an accident scene, they disgust you, but you just can't stop looking. Other parts are a beautiful portrayal of native life, human nature, and a struggle to balance human nature with faith. I was impressed by the historical accuracy of the novel. An enormous amount of research obviously went into its making. Although it was difficult at times to read, it was certainly entertaining and was of great educational value.

I would reccommend the novel to mature readers who want a sober view of the relationships between Europeans and Natives in Canada. A relationship which tore deeply into the culture and traditions of the First Nations people, the scars of which can be seen to our day.