The Colour of Blood: Complete & Unabridged [Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize back in 1987, this novel is fast-paced and economical, written in spare but telling prose. It concerns the dilemma of Cardinal Bem, who stands in, perhaps for religious leaders in many of the smaller nations subsumed beneath Mother Russia's brooding ambition during the period of the early Soviet Union. Before that subsumption turned into outright dictatorship, religious worship was tolerated in individual states, such as Belarus, which is Cardinal Bem's country.

Perhaps because we all know the outcome of religion's struggle for an official place under the Soviet regime, we are prepared for the story's fatalism. Steeped in Catholic ritual and contention (should, for instance, religious leaders ever become involved in politics? Or perhaps one could frame this question in a way suggesting that they already are involved in the wider political system if they do not challenge perceived injustices?) this novel is also a thoroughly engaging thriller, with a cliff-hanging plot. It is an easy, tautly enjoyable read.

This is a short, well written thriller - a page turner which keeps the reader guessing throughout. At another level it explores the compromises which have to be made to preserve some measure of independence and integrity whilst living in a totalitarian regime.

"The Colour of Blood" is set in an unnamed, fictitious Eastern European country during the 1980s. (References in the text date the action to late August and early September of 1986). At least, the country is ostensibly fictitious, but there can be little doubt that Brian Moore had Poland in mind; the country is predominantly Catholic, has a strong, independent trade union movement on the lines of Solidarity and power lies, not with the civilian Communist Party leaders but with a military dictator reminiscent of General Jaruzelski. To make it even more obvious which country he is referring to, Moore gives his hero the surname Bem (after the Polish national hero Jozef Bem) and his military strongman the surname Urban; Jaruzelski's propaganda minister was named Jerzy Urban.

After Cardinal Stephen Bem, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in this country, narrowly survives an assassination attempt, he is taken into what is described as "protective custody" by men claiming to belong to the Security Services. He discovers, however, that his captors are not what they seem, but are in reality members of a fanatical anti-Communist movement within the Church, who despise Bem because they seem him as a traitor and a collaborator with the regime. Their aim is to prevent him from attending a forthcoming religious celebration in which a more radical Archbishop intends to call for protests and demonstrations against the Government. Escaping from his captors, Bem has to make his way to the celebrations to ensure that his own call for peaceful co-existence can be heard.

Moore is sometimes bracketed together with Graham Greene as a "Catholic novelist", but there was an important difference between them. Greene was brought up as an Anglican but converted to Catholicism as a young man. Moore was a "cradle Catholic" who lost his faith but who nevertheless continued to deal with Catholic themes. "The Colour of Blood" reminded me in some respects of Green's writings. Like some of Greene's novels it is in form a political thriller, but a thriller which attempts to deal with religious and philosophical issues. There are similarities with Greene's "The Power and the Glory", another novel about a Catholic clergyman confronted with a dictatorial, anti-religious regime.

Nevertheless, I felt that "The Colour of Blood" did not work either as a thriller or as an exploration of politics and religion. On a purely technical level, I found it dull and pedestrian, a thriller which fails to thrill. On a more serious level I found it dispiriting and politically objectionable. I do not mean by this that Moore is an apologist for Communism; no Marxist novelist wishing to make propaganda for his particular creed would be likely to set one of his novels in a thinly-fictionalised version of Jaruzelski's Poland, a regime which abandoned the last vestiges of the pretence that Communism was a dictatorship of the proletariat rather than a dictatorship pure and simple. Although Jaruzelski was ostensibly a Communist, his real ideology was a jackbooted, parade-ground authoritarianism, virtually indistinguishable from that of his ostensibly capitalist contemporaries such as Pinochet and Galtieri.

Moore's political creed, as expressed through his main character Bem, amounts to a sort of passive fatalism, a belief that God is on the side of the big battalions and that the little man, if he knows what is good for him, will not challenge their divine right to rule. What makes it so depressing is that Bem opposes not only violent resistance to the regime- Christian pacifism has a long and honourable history- but also any form of non-violent protest. Just two years after this book was written in 1987 the falsity of that creed was exposed when all over Eastern Europe- not just in Poland but also in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Rumania- the little men stood up against their oppressors. The Berlin Wall fell and Communism found itself in that dustbin of history it had long predicted would be the resting-place of all opposing ideologies. This book should join it there.