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The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

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After cranking out a string of pot-boiler thrillers, Judith Hearne was Moore's debut venture into the world of the serious novel. Here he sought to depict the epic, cosmic conflicts that are under the surface of the most seemingly ordinary of lives. He set it squarely in 1950's Belfast, where he was raised as one of the Catholic minority. He hated Belfast, calling it a "claustrophobic, provincial backwater... trapped in the nightmare of history" and plagued equally with Protestant self-righteousness and Catholic repressiveness. All of these sentiments find their way into this, his first literary novel.
Judith, convent-raised, unmarried, and forty-something moves into Mrs. Rice's boarding house on Camden Street. It is her sixth relocation in the last few years. We find out WHY later. She teaches piano and embroidery to an ever diminishing handful of students, has very few possessions, and fewer social attachments. In fact, her only social involvement is tea with the O'Neill family on Sunday afternoons. Only later do we find how one-sided even this relationship is. The O'Neills secretly dread her visits.
We are soon to sense the brooding cloud of narrowness, plainness, loneliness, and ignorance that hovers over this poor soul. Moore captures it. Even her physical frame, he says, is "plain as a cheap clothes rack."
To sustain herself she lives in a world of religious faith and imagination... or illusion. She daydreams, and surrounds herself with iconic totems from her uneventful past. And she has a secret vice that isn't revealed until almost midway in the novel. She's a(n) _____! (I won't say).
The novel revolves around Judith's interactions with the many other residents of Mrs. Rice's home. Because of Judith's long repressed desires and vivid imagination, she is quick to assume that Mr. Madden's attentions will lead to a splendid marriage. But in their mutually illusive worlds they are both nursing dissimilar motives as regards each other. And meanwhile, Judith is being horribly set up for a total spiritual/emotional breakdown by a certain nefarious Iago-like presence in the home. As a result of her mounting disappointments she questions (abandons?) her religious faith, and is led in increasing measure to wallow in her secret vice... the real "passion" of Judith Hearne. And it is indeed, partaken in abject loneliness. Even the Church, represented by the tactless Father Quigley, rejects her cry for help. He heaps penitence and guilt where forgiveness and grace are needed.

This novel is brilliant in its portrayal of a woman at the very outer limits of disillusionment. Trapped by the passage of time. In the end, she looks in the mirror and smiles a costly smile. It has cost her the illusion, the pretence, and the ill-founded faith of all her years.

This slender novel is a master class in fiction writing. I've read it at least ten times, and every time I learn something new. Mr. Moore's command of fictional technique is astonishing. He uses the basic elements of the craft (point of view, narrative voice, recurring details, etc.) like brushstrokes in a painting. Bit by bit, sentence by sentence, Judith Hearne and the people around her are revealed. The plot moves forward with the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, and when the climax comes, we are devastated. We know everything there is to know about this plain, brave, flawed woman, and we know that things could not have turned out otherwise for her.

In addition to its flawless execution, this book reveals an almost unbearable depth of compassion for human weakness and a keen understanding of human nature. While Judith Hearne may seem to belong very much to a particular time and place, we should not be so quick to label the book a period piece. We are still struggling to connect to each other, to find love and security, to reconcile faith and fact. Mr. Moore's themes are timeless. As long as there are human beings, Judith Hearne will have something to teach them. Her story gives us much to mourn about who (and what) we are, but in revealing her to us, Mr. Moore also gives us much to celebrate.

I can't recommend this book highly enough. Please read it.

It cannot be emphasized enough what a masterpiece this book is. It is packed tight like a little bomb and like a bomb it explodes in your hands. Writers especially should take note of this book: not a single word is wasted. Every sentence furthers the plot -- that of a desperate and near-hysterical drunken Irish spinster who is feebly holding onto her faith. It is also one of those rare books that manages to be both literary and plot-driven. Merciless tension is sustained throughout.

The writing will remind you of early Joyce (Dubliners) coupled with the pained humor of Chekhov. It is rich in imagery and detail and the pacing is perfect. Unforgettable characters abound, from the Yank-wannabe cripple James Madden, to the pudgy, poetaster Bernard Rice, to Judith herself, a shabby-genteel dame who only wants to be loved.

This is classic writing by a great writer who deserves a wider audience.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearn is probably one of the most beautiful books in contempory Irish literature. Brian Moore treats Judy Hearn with a completely unbiased nature; he is definitely in touch with the character's values, and her flaws. Moore has shaped a novel of his time and Ireland's people that will probably influence many for years to come.

Brian Moore published The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (originally called simply Judith Hearne), in 1955 after he had left Belfast for Montreal. For this book Moore won the Author's Club First Novel Award. The book appears on the Guardian's list of 1000 books 'everyone must read'. A 1988 movie of the same name starred Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins. Graham Greene called Moore his 'favourite living novelist'.

Moore plumbs the turbid soul of a desperately lonely woman who's on the verge of becoming an old spinster. She's done in by the repressive mores of her culture, which she has internalized and of which she's largely uncritical. (Moore based Hearne loosely on one of his mother's friends, Mary Judith Keogh.) The other character whose thoughts are probed at length is James Madden, Hearne's last chance at a husband. He, too, has outlived his dreams and, like Hearne, drifts though his days in fear and frustration, which are relieved only by vices that promise short-term relief but long-term doom.

Moore's story is marred by some heavy-handed symbols (an empty church, e.g.), and I grew impatient with the protracted torments to which the author subjected poor Judy Hearne. Nevertheless, the book is a masterful and disturbing study of the demolition of a life by loneliness.

Hearne seeks refuge from her isolation in weekly visits with a happy and prosperous family whose patriarch she has known since childhood. She half knows that the family members generally dread her visits, but she goes to them anyway out of sheer desperation for human contact. These portions of the book are pretty painful, for Moore makes it clear that the family members don't take Hearne seriously as a person. They treat her more as an ongoing bad joke.

This dismissiveness is echoed near the end of the story by other denizens of Hearne's bleak little society. She's generally written off as a 'nutter' who's pitied after being brushed aside.

In one part of the story, Hearne visits someone in a residential hospital, where the patients interact mainly with people who are -- well -- paid to interact with them. In a cruel paradox, they (like Hearne herself) lead lives that suffer from a dearth of meaningful relationships but also a lack of privacy.

This is one of the most remarkable books that I've ever read. Miss Hearne, mannered and facade-driven, is an outcast even to herself. She moves from boarding home to boarding home because she is a severe alcoholic and is running out of money. She gets in trouble in the boarding houses because of her drinking or she doesn't have enough money to pay her rent.

She spent most of her youth caring for an unthankful and difficult aunt and when her aunt died, Ms. Hearne was left no inheritance and had no chance of marrying because of her age and plainess.

At the most recent boarding house she is in, she takes a liking to the owner's brother. Sadly for Miss Hearne the feelings are not reciprocated. At first the man is nice to her because he thinks she has money. As soon as he finds out that she is nearly destitute, he is uninterested in her.

Miss Hearne is a regular church goer. However, the priest at the church she attends is not able to answer her questions about faith and God.

Her only connection is to her fantasy life and some distant friends of her aunt who dislike, mock and pity her. She hides herself from others and once she loses her faith in God, all is lost to her.

Her decline, as narrated by the author, is brilliant. There is not one wasted word.

Having just read and largely disliked one novel (Joseph O'Connor's GHOST LIGHT) about an aging Irishwoman facing the disintegration of her life, is it not a kind of masochism to immediately attempt another? But I have come to trust New York Review Books reprints, and this touching novel by Brian Moore had the additional attraction of taking me back to my birthplace, Belfast, as it was in my childhood. Not that Moore paints a romantic picture of that cold city: "the drab facades of the building grouped around the Square, proclaiming the virtues of trade, hard-dealing, and Presbyterian righteousness. The order, the neatness, the floodlit cenotaph, a white respectable phallus planted in sinking Irish bog. The Protestant dearth of gaiety, the Protestant surfeit of order, the dour Ulster burghers walking proudly among those monuments to their mediocrity." Yes indeed! But the lives in Moore's book are led beneath these pompous surfaces, in the Catholic substrata, which know both gaiety and tragedy, but seldom mediocrity. There are no saints in this novel, but the people are sketched with warmth and understanding, seasoning any sadness with irony and humor.

Miss Hearne is a woman in her forties living on an inadequate annuity and her sporadic earnings as a piano teacher. Her younger life wasted by caring for a tyrannical aunt, she now gathers the shreds of faded gentility around her as best she can. She has just moved into a furnished room in a run-down area near the University, and most of the dramatis personae are other inhabitants of the house: the inquisitive landlady, her idle but dangerous son, and her brother recently returned from America. Though seeing this man as brash and vulgar, Miss Hearne knows that he may be her last chance at marriage; he also seems attracted to her. But their fumbling pursuit of each other is based on mutual misunderstanding, and when Judy Hearne discovers the truth, her entire life begins to unravel.

Moore frames Judy's story between the society around her and the Church above. He frequently changes his viewpoint to enter the thoughts of other characters in the story, even including bit-part players, as though in cameo scenes from a radio play. The shifts of style and focus show the influence of James Joyce, but Moore quite avoids the florid overwriting that was Joyce's bequest to so many lesser Irish writers. Miss Hearne's one consolation in life has been her religion; one of the first things she does in each new place is to hang a picture of the Sacred Heart over her bed. The numerous scenes in church or church-run institutions, although often seeming strange to a non-Catholic reader, are essential to the success of the novel. What is the Church to be the arbiter of correct behavior, consolation in misfortune, and the means of recovery from sin? Does the God at its center truly exist, or care? Whatever you may think of Moore's answer or poor Judy Hearne's, the very question raises her pathetic story to quite a different plane.

I enjoyed this extraordinary novel of grueling and reeling faith as much for the suspense of where the author would take it, as well as his narrative skill and meta-fictional literary tricks employed to both keep the reader grounded and wrenching his attention with shortcuts that lands the reader just where he wants. Yes, it might be pointed out that another Irish author, James Joyce, did such experimental writing earlier and more extensively. True, but one can fly through this writing whereas no one has ever flown through Ulysses - not ever with two feet in the air at the same time! Besides, there are some interesting parallels between the two, though they remain separate and different works.

Brian Moore was born into a large Catholic family in Belfast in 1921 surrounded by the Irish Protestants, who held power. In 1948 he immigrated to Canada, then in the mid-sixties, to California where he lived until his passing in 1999. Some of his books include Catholics (1972), Cold Heaven (1983) and No Other Life (1993). Judith Hearne was his first successful novel, from 1955. Graham Greene considered Brian Moore one of his favorite authors.

Judith Hearne is a plain middle-aged spinster who spent her more attractive years shut away caring for a crippled and abusive aunt and was left with nothing when the aunt finally passed. With slender means and limited skills she senses that people - and especially men - pass her by. Nipping the bottle for liquid courage she finds its good ephemeral, and consequences often disastrous. When she turns to faith her habit of ready criticism built up over the years to counter her own failures lashes out against her priest and the Church itself. "All men turned from me. And You, Father? You too," sobs her thinking.

Wavering over the guilt caused by her inebriated antics and the ever-ready guilt of daring to question God, her mind stubbornly reasons, "There is no heavenly reason to feel guilt. At least, nobody has shown me there is."

"Why do I feel guilt?" her mind screams and aches a few minutes later as she proceeds in cutting off another avenue of retreat amongst her acquaintances.

Nevertheless, Moore never lets us feel too sorry for Miss Hearne as her struggle is part of our own - leaving us racing to the book's conclusion.

What a novel! Here in a tantalyzing weaving of different characters' perspectives, we learn about the various levels of Belfast society and its intolerances. The main character is an Irish woman who let her shorthand slide, so she teaches piano for a living, and continues to lose her students steadily as the children's parents discover she has alcohol on her breath.

Surreptiously she takes long bus rides to the edge of town for whiskey-buying expeditions, and has to take the clinking bottles back up the stairs of her lonely room. She seems to have no real friends or interests, and is moving from boarding house to boarding house as her alcoholism is discovered; landlords kick her out. What is new and exciting in this parish is the older brother of the landlady just back from 30 years of living in New York, making allusions to his life in the hotel business. She finds out by accident that he was a doorman for a hotel. He'd done every job he could find in the rough streets of NYC, and thought his doorman job the best ever he'd found, until he was injured by a car hitting him, giving him one bum leg dragging. These and many other details are piled up upon the reader through various characters' gossiping with each other. For example, the 30-year-old Mama's boy, son of the landlady, is screwing the 16-year-old maid, and hangs out all day with no job, telling tale tales and spreading malicious humors to keep his own reputation clean. The ex-NYer was a very disappointed fellow who started drinking at bars, just to stay out of the house, realizing that he had no place in his old home country, neither in his small village in Donegal, nor in Belfast, so he mutters about "going down to Dublin", but never does he leave. He can live rent-free at his sister's, and she resents it o boy!

The sad decline into a drinking binge of this woman is quite a feat; one suspects the writer must have himself experienced it or known someone who'd done the same. It's peculiarly Irish, how far down she goes, in her last faint hopes for romance, crushed when the NY'er begins to ignore her when he realizes she has no money and can't be a business partner.

And so it goes... better not give away anymore of the plot.

Says it all... Read it years ago, read it again last week....gets better and better.