SECOND READING

Judith Hearne, alone and lonely, unpacks yet again. The silver-framed photograph of her dead aunt is positioned in a place of honour, as ever, on the mantelpiece of "whatever bed-sitting-room Miss Hearne happened to be living in".

Within sentences, Brian Moore, in this his first and finest novel, leaves no doubts; his anti-heroine appears to be as defeated as is her new room in this "run-down part of Belfast". A second picture is unwrapped, a coloured oleograph of the Sacred Heart, "His eyes kindly yet accusing". The clues are already mounting, Judith Hearne, clearly beaten by life, continues to be dominated by her dead aunt and a religion that for her is more concerned with ritual than belief. Judith addresses the aunt's photograph, informing her that this once smart residential area has become flatland.

Quickly she moves on to more practical matters. She has picture hooks with her but needs a hammer before she can hang the Sacred Heart over her bed. The quest brings her downstairs to her new landlady, Mrs Henry Rice. There she meets Bernard, the repulsive son "all bristly blond jowls, tiny puffy hands and long blond curly hair, like some monstrous baby swelled to man size". Judith is shocked that this "ugly pudding" possesses a "soft and compelling" speaking voice.

So adroitly does Moore enter the often bizarrely jaunty mind of Judith Hearne, unloved, genteel spinster, that it seems as if she is speaking directly to us. Like an animal accustomed to being kicked, she expects to be rejected by any male she encounters. Moore's approach to the telling, the precise evocation of a decay shared by most of the characters as well as Belfast itself, appears initially to share something of the tone of Joyce's Dubliners - and Joyce is obviously an influence. Yet this novel is far closer to William Trevor's vision of boarding house life in London. Judith's hopeless predicament is pathetic and partly traceable to her aunt's domineering influence, and her own weakness, at times of crisis, for alcohol. Moore remains detached and as interested in exposing the religious hypocrisy and repressive social attitudes prevailing in Belfast, the native city he fled yet always admitted to never having fully escaped, as he is in her. Judith, despite her self pity, is a fantasist with a flair for subconscious self delusion.

With the arrival of Jim Madden, the landlady's widower brother, back home after some 30 years in New York, Moore reiterates the theme of self delusion. Unlike Judith with her shaky grasp of correct behaviour, Madden is incontestably crude. For Judith he is a possibly attainable, if lame and no longer young, future husband; for him she is a potential business partner, no more.

Throughout the narrative Moore brilliantly shifts the viewpoint between characters who always think and act true to themselves. Among the many inspired set pieces are the Sunday afternoon teas at Professor O'Neill's home during which Judith is endured rather than enjoyed. Published in 1955 and never out of print, The Lonely Passion displays the psychological astuteness Moore would bring to his subsequent diverse, moral fictions.

This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne By Brian Moore