Abstract

Irish Ghosts

The article presents information on the book "Fergus," by Brian Moore. During the day and night of the story, the title character in Brian Moore's new novel, the writer Fergus Patrick Fadden, experiences hallucinations that force him to question himself and his unreal visitors from the past and from the grave about existence, the afterlife, and the Meaning of Things. Such a description of the plot suggests an oversimple story, and there are a number of other apparent faults as well. The story is slight, in length and in scope. The characters are simple-minded, flat, and, with almost no exception, unsympathetically drawn. In Fergus the world of Southern California is portrayed as one of sterility and compromise, of synthetic fabric and formica apartments, of coordinated furnishings itemized with malicious detail, of play-up and sell-out to the gross movers of the motion picture industry.