Lies of Silence
Gromer, Crystal
they feel, even if only unconsciously, for the historical disadvantages that were visited upon blacks--and for the illegitimate advantage that they enjoy as a result. Blacks seek power in the...
...The challenge for blacks now, says Steele, "is to reclaim ourselves from the exaggerations of our own memory and to go forward as the free American citizens that we are...
...plot is the driving force of our fear...
...Steele describes the minuet beautifully...
...Is it for those 24: Commonweal reasons she announces histrionically at dinner when her mother admonishes her to have sense...
...Neither is Moira, for the teenage terrorists had fled from her living room even before the bomb was due to go off...
...And it's not only nostalgia buffs or diehard monarchists who get misty-eyed over its vanished glory...
...Perhaps only the Middle East, for many of the same causes-- some even having the same agents, Lloyd George, Alfred Balfour, their double-sided negotiating in the first decades of this century, and timeless imperial greed among them--seems as hopeless of resolution as Northern Ireland...
...with concentrations in Pastoral Ministry and Spirituality, Theology, Scripture, Religious Education...
...That is what happens to Michael Dillon...
...11 January 1991:25...
...Weary, she continues, "A united Ireland...
...Or is it simply that she enjoys the fuss of being the celebrity of the moment, rushed into makeup and onto the air...
...The genre of violence does violence to a complex, if contentious, history...
...Pottinger is to address a breakfast audience...
...It's people like us who're the only ones who can stop them," Moira says, agreeing with her father's outburst against the IRA...
...And even that is disappearing now, as whites grow weary of the dance...
...The hotel is an eternity and a second away...
...Paul, St...
...Brian Moore's theme, however, is not only about the costs of saying nothing in that slippery grey Ulster Heaney calls a "land of password, handgrip, wink and nod," but also about the costs of getting mixed up in it all the same and finding oneself unable to say nothing...
...Moira remains behind in the living room, hostage to the plan's success...
...it is a good thriller, tautly told, chilling...
...There is nothing here you couldn't learn in a two-hour movie...
...That purpose is to make us turn pages, quickly, apprehensively...
...A formidable power in the heart of Europe, Austria, and later Austria-Hungdry, was i n h a b i t e d by Germans, Slavs, Hungarians, Italians, Romanians, to name only the major nationalities, and ruled by German-speaking Habsburg kings who were distinctly unGerman in their more tolerant, peaceable ways...
...But it makes for disappointing reading nonetheless...
...I should tell the way they treated us . . . . My husband had to choose between saving his wife's life or saving the life of the likes of "Porringer...
...Most guilty are those in Westminister who turn a blind eye to Ulster and its injustices...
...He parks his car...
...when they dissent, their act tunately, such power can never be more than a semblance...
...the dining room of the Clarence Hotel is damaged, but no one is injured...
...Their plan is to place a bomb in Michael's car, and then have him drive it to the hotel he manages, where an Ian Paisley figure named Dr...
...For further information, call or write: Paul Couture, S.S.E., Director, Graduate Theology and Pastoral Ministry, Saint Michael's College, Winooski Park, Colchester, Vermont 05439 U.S.A...
...she asks the producer of ther newscast...
...Yet detractors of this patchwork empire always viewed it as an impossible creation, a "prison of nations," whose demise was hastened, if not caused, by the First World War...
...Leader: Stephen Doyle, O.EM...
...He also describes its corrosive effects, including programs and gestures calculated not to promote genuine black development, but to give whites a feeling of innocence and blacks a semblance of power...
...Also Master's Degrees in: Clinical Psychology, Education, Administration, Teaching English As a Second Language...
...The tendency nowadays is to glamorize the old monarchy...
...A GOOD PARADE BEYOND NATIONALISM A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848-1918 Istvfik Defik Oxford University Press, $39.95, 286 pp...
...a mother, exasperated, questions her daughter in Moore's novel...
...I should tell the whole world what happened to us last night...
...Whatever you say, say nothing: the mother's theme...
...Have some sense...
...For the lies that Moore sees raging in Ulster, "lies told over the years to poor Protestant working people about the Catholics, lies to poor Catholic working people about the Protestants, lies from parliaments and pulpits, lies at rallies and funeral orations"--are not only sins of commission, but at their worst, they are lies of silence, the lies that come of saying nothing, and sins of omission as well...
...But Moira goes on a campaign...
...The Northern habit of survival rests in silence...
...of speech is rained upon by violence or by the threat of it...
...All these things are almost unbearably alive to him on a drive that seems interminable, packed as it is with the observations of a lifetime, packed as it is with a bomb...
...So the assassination is to go, without warning...
...Don't worry about the Ulster fry...
...Did you see me on the news...
...There is no magic that will make development happen...
...There is not enough life in Brian Moore's new novel for us to care about the deaths which close it...
...Am I all right...
...Why does she do this...
...And then, if we're shot, the whole world will know why we're being shot...
...Within hours she's on television...
...Her speech comes, at least in part, in bitter retaliation to her husband's silence after the bombing, his betrayal of her during it...
...Blacks seek power in the only way they have ever successfully wielded it: by flaunting their victimization and inducing guilt in whites...
...It's all madness, this, madness, and don't you be going and getting mixed up in it...
...Ivan Sanders t a time when nationalism is on the march worldwide, and remaining multinational states are torn by ethnic strife, a fresh look at one of the most curious and colorful political formations, the Habsburg Monarchy, may seem especially opportune...
...UnforA LAND OF PASSWOHD LIES OF SILENCE Brian Moore Doubleday, $18.95, 197 pp...
...Lies o f Silence is a thriller...
...Is there life before death...
...Crystal Gromer hatever you say say nothing," the title of a poem in Seamus Heaney's 1975 volume North, could serve as apt epigraph for Brian Moore's new novel, Lies of Silence, which takes him--perhaps as reluctantly as his main character--back to Belfast, his birthplace...
...The daughter of a Catholic butcher on the Falls road, Moira understands lies of silence...
...John, and Ancient Greece...
...August 5-19, 1991...
...Everyone welcome...
...Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us," Heaney says, and fifteen years later, the characters in Moore's Belfast agree...
...The South of Ireland doesn't want us and couldn't take care of us if we were handed to them on a plate tomorrow...
...Disheartened republicans and radicals are just as likely to sing its praises, and confuse the monarchy's rich cultural SAINT MICHAEL'S COLLEGE Graduate Theology and Pastoral Ministry 30th Annual Summer Session June 23--August 2, 1991 Three-week and six-week courses for credit or audit, certificate or degree (M.A...
...802) 655-2000 Ext...
...On his drive through the streets of Belfast that morning, Michael Dillon observes details with the hypersensitivity of the newly condemned: three boys rushing and shouting on their way to school, the equestrian statue showing King William in victory at the Boyne~ the Victorian houses around Queen's University, alight that day with the festivities of graduation...
...It's not Brian Moore's intention to show why Moira---or Michael or any of the other characters in Lies o f Silence--do what they do...
...she asks Michael...
...Moira is not one to forego the careful application of eyeliner, even if it is under the nervous eye of a young IRA gunman...
...Another martyr for the cause...
...We simply have to want more for ourselves, be willing to work for it, and not use our enemy...as an excuse not to pursue it...
...So, it's better you say nothing," Detective Inspector Harry Randall counsels the estranged couple...
...Overhead, he hears a tour group discussing the benefits of eating up a good breakfast, already paid for, since lunch is both unknown and uncovered...
...2579...
...On the night he has come home ready to tell his wife that he is leaving her for another woman (just as he is leaving Belfast for London), on the night he has gathered together his courage and his passport, he encounters not visions of his new life, but four frighteningly young terrorists of the IRA...
...Student and Family Housing...
...It feels shallow, as though with four films of previous novels behind him, Moore was writing it more with an eye to a film than to a reading audience...
...You'll be dead by lunchtime, Michael Dillon thinks in the isolation of his secret knowledge...
...She knows in an instant that her husband bartered her life for other lives, just as she knows, without his having said anything, that he will leave her for another woman...
...Hooded in woolen balaclavas, armed, they force Michael and Moira Dillon to get up from bed and wait for dawn in their living room, watched over by first one guard, then another...
...We should stand our ground...
...As the hotel manager, Dillon will pass through the security guard and park his car in his accustomed spot, just under the windows where Pottinger is to speak...
...Dillon, however, decides to tip off the police...
...Sara Butler 1991 Faculty and Courses The Divine Image: God, Christ, Christian Anthropology Invitations to Grace: the Sacraments of the Church Spirituality and Human Sexuality The Johannine Writings Foundations of Religious Education Key Issues in Medical Ethics American Catholic Spirituality Religion and Politics in Latin America The Synoptic Gospels The Prophets of lsrael Christology : An Introduction to Discipleship Introduction to Pastoral Counseling Richard Fragomeni Rose Clarisse Gadoury Wilfrid Harrington Brennan Hill Philip Keane John Lozano Otto Maduro Frank Matera Thomas McCreesh Lucien Richard Robert Wicks Greece / Turkey Trip (Cities of St...
...It is too spare, too much itself a victim of Northern reticence...
...Seamus Heaney quotes a graffitti slogan at the conclusion of his poem...
...Financial aid...
...Why does she break the taboo of the tribe...
...My face, I mean...
...For though Moore has written wonderful novels that portray people of complexity and pathos, the characters in this novel are very little fleshed out, as though stick figures, stock figures, will do for the purpose he has at hand...
...Or is it that Moira gets caught up in her own rightness, and that the injury she's suffered is more personal than political...
Vol. 118 • January 1991 • No. 1
