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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3.0 out of 5 stars
A Cardinal Chase,
This review is from: Colour of Blood (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (Paperback)
The Colour of Blood is a tight, page-turning Catholic thriller in the Graham Greene tradition. The opening sequence hits the ground running: Cardinal Bem, head of the Church in an unnamed Soviet bloc country, is being chauffered back to his residence when "he saw, peripherally, a black car racing very close to his. He turned to look. The driver, a woman, wore a green silk scarf tied around her head. Beside her in the passenger seat, a bearded man, holding a revolver in both hands, raised it, aiming at him."
That's just the first page. The rest of the book follows the Cardinal as he flees from unknown captors and attempts to discover what organization was behind the assassination attempt--the Secret Police, who are antagonistic to the Church, or could it have been a fringe organization within the Church, who feel that Cardinal Bem has compromised too often with the Communist government? Brian Moore's writing has textbook clarity: limpid, economical, and unfussy. "The Colour of Blood" was short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize in the U.K, and was awarded the Sunday Express' Book of the Year. Though it drags in a few spots, and the ending (as another reviewer noted) is somewhat anticlimactic, on the whole the novel is well-crafted, suspenseful, and deeply orthodox. As an exemplar of smart genre writing, "The Colour of Blood" could take pride of place next to a Graham Greene thriller.
2.0 out of 5 stars
Slow Speed Chase,
By "booshkindoggin" (Santa Clara, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Colour of Blood (Audio Cassette)
RE: AUDIO CASSETTE VERSION. In this Cold War curiosity, the Catholic cardinal of a Russian puppet state must balance the forces of the secret police on the one hand and the "patriotic clergy" on the other, while struggling to maintain his own link with God. The character study of the hero is strong enough that the reader may be carried well into the tale before realizing that nothing much actually happens. The baddies are not ruthless enough and the promised action is never delivered so that ultimately the story is as gray and drab as everyday life may have been in such a place.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
One for the Dustbin of History,
By
This review is from: Colour of Blood (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (Paperback)
"The Colour of Blood" is set in an unnamed, fictitious Eastern European country during the 1980s. (References in the text date the action to late August and early September of 1986). At least, the country is ostensibly fictitious, but there can be little doubt that Brian Moore had Poland in mind; the country is predominantly Catholic, has a strong, independent trade union movement on the lines of Solidarity and power lies, not with the civilian Communist Party leaders but with a military dictator reminiscent of General Jaruzelski. To make it even more obvious which country he is referring to, Moore gives his hero the surname Bem (after the Polish national hero Jozef Bem) and his military strongman the surname Urban; Jaruzelski's propaganda minister was named Jerzy Urban.
After Cardinal Stephen Bem, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in this country, narrowly survives an assassination attempt, he is taken into what is described as "protective custody" by men claiming to belong to the Security Services. He discovers, however, that his captors are not what they seem, but are in reality members of a fanatical anti-Communist movement within the Church, who despise Bem because they seem him as a traitor and a collaborator with the regime. Their aim is to prevent him from attending a forthcoming religious celebration in which a more radical Archbishop intends to call for protests and demonstrations against the Government. Escaping from his captors, Bem has to make his way to the celebrations to ensure that his own call for peaceful co-existence can be heard. Moore is sometimes bracketed together with Graham Greene as a "Catholic novelist", but there was an important difference between them. Greene was brought up as an Anglican but converted to Catholicism as a young man. Moore was a "cradle Catholic" who lost his faith but who nevertheless continued to deal with Catholic themes. "The Colour of Blood" reminded me in some respects of Green's writings. Like some of Greene's novels it is in form a political thriller, but a thriller which attempts to deal with religious and philosophical issues. There are similarities with Greene's "The Power and the Glory", another novel about a Catholic clergyman confronted with a dictatorial, anti-religious regime. Nevertheless, I felt that "The Colour of Blood" did not work either as a thriller or as an exploration of politics and religion. On a purely technical level, I found it dull and pedestrian, a thriller which fails to thrill. On a more serious level I found it dispiriting and politically objectionable. I do not mean by this that Moore is an apologist for Communism; no Marxist novelist wishing to make propaganda for his particular creed would be likely to set one of his novels in a thinly-fictionalised version of Jaruzelski's Poland, a regime which abandoned the last vestiges of the pretence that Communism was a dictatorship of the proletariat rather than a dictatorship pure and simple. Although Jaruzelski was ostensibly a Communist, his real ideology was a jackbooted, parade-ground authoritarianism, virtually indistinguishable from that of his ostensibly capitalist contemporaries such as Pinochet and Galtieri. Moore's political creed, as expressed through his main character Bem, amounts to a sort of passive fatalism, a belief that God is on the side of the big battalions and that the little man, if he knows what is good for him, will not challenge their divine right to rule. What makes it so depressing is that Bem opposes not only violent resistance to the regime- Christian pacifism has a long and honourable history- but also any form of non-violent protest. Just two years after this book was written in 1987 the falsity of that creed was exposed when all over Eastern Europe- not just in Poland but also in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Rumania- the little men stood up against their oppressors. The Berlin Wall fell and Communism found itself in that dustbin of history it had long predicted would be the resting-place of all opposing ideologies. This book should join it there.
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