SOURCE: "Conversion to Doubt: George Moore's The Lake" in Notes on Modern Irish Literature, Vol. 4, 1992, pp. 35-41.

In the essay below, Deane explores the complex nature of Moore's protagonist Father Gogarty, focusing on his spiritual development in the short novel.

Since the beginning of the Irish Renaissance, the Catholic clergy has not, in general, been accorded a favorable image by Irish commentators, an arresting fact in so predominantly Catholic a country. Equally surprising is the number of priests in Irish literature who question their faith, who lose it altogether, or who, at the least, are faced with threats to it. Early in the twentieth century appeared the prototypical Irish work about a priest, The Lake (1904). In it George Moore made Father Oliver Gogarty the central character in one of the most complex portraits of a clergyman ever written.

Father Gogarty is an unattractive man, an intellectual and physical...