Brian Moore whisks the reader into a world tortured by political problems in the plot-driven novel ‘Lies of Silence’. Moore’s fantastic imagery paints an incredibly convincing picture of the troubled reality of everyday Northern Ireland. In a very powerful opening chapter the central character Michael Dillon decides to leave his wife for his mistress Andrea. The reader is lulled into a false sense of security, naïvely picturing lovers escaping to a better place, but Moore had a deeper, darker story to tell.
On the night before he plans to confess his affair, Dillon and his wife are held hostage in their own home in Belfast by the IRA. The thugs plant a bomb in his car boot and order him to drive it to the hotel where he works. Internal conflict is a key theme in the book, and Dillon faces some huge dilemmas, including choosing whether to save hundreds of people, or his wife. The book quickly transforms into a thriller as Dillon finds himself on the run from the IRA.
Moore’s skilled writing techniques make this novel impossible to put down; a real page turner. This is a first class novel from a highly underrated author; the only factors that let it down are a rather hostile central character with a lack of emotion and an overly objective view of the world, and a very predictable ending. I would highly recommend this novel to any reader mature enough to appreciate the complexities of the situation in Northern Ireland.
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