It is nearly thirty years since Brian Moore's first novel, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, proved that here was a significantly new voice in Irish fiction. Of that book Moore has told us that he wanted to explore his own religious unbelief but, preferring to project it away from autobiography, he did so through the question: what if one of my mother's sodality friends were to lose the faith? [In Cold Heaven] he is still supremely at home with a feminine consciousness at the centre and he is still weaving dramas of crisis on the flux of belief and unbelief. But this time the temptation has altered in direction: we are now given a totally secular woman being disturbed by evidences of the supernatural. (pp. 131-32)

Ever since the apparitions of Fergus, Moore has allowed himself a certain obsession with the ghostly. The Great Victorian Collection concerned...