Moore's latest novel The Mangan Inheritance, is an "entertainment," most of which I found highly entertaining. Most, but not all.

It has every Irish cliché—guilt, mist, red hair, drunkenness, madness, poetry, lust, ruined castles, violence, a fair amount of sex and some incest, the kind of thing the Irish Censorship Board used to save us from in the days when Moore was a young Irish exile writing short stories in Canada.

In the novel, Moore writes in the phantasmagorical tradition of the old Irish "Seanachai" or storytellers who used to travel about the country weaving tales—usually for their night's drink and lodgings—in which the supernatural and the commonplace, fantasy and fact were all tools for the telling.

It is a genre which suits Moore, because sometimes when he is writing in the grip of that fundamental pessimism of the Irish, particularly of the Irish artist...