For Ganae read Haiti and for the outgoing dictator read Duvalier, and you will have Brian Moore's seventeenth novel centred. A poor, corrupt, former French Caribbean colony ruled by a mulatto elite and their secret police, sees Father Paul Michel take under his wing a young, intelligent black boy from a remote village whom he calls Jeannot. The boy grows up quickly, joining the priesthood, seeing the domination of his people for what it is, and as a brave, messianic orator inspires them to rise for the cause of democracy, eventually bowing to pressure in standing for election himself and taking power on a landslide victory.

But Jeannot's step across the line into politics angers Rome and the powerful Ganaen bishops, and through them those still loyal to the old malignant regime, some gaoled, some fleeing, awaiting their time.

The first thing that leaps off the page in Moore's novel is its economy and distance. Telling its story through Father Michel, an ageing white -- blanc -- priest, Moore steps back from actively sweeping the reader up in the tidal wave of Jeannot's rise to power. As the older man's protege, Michel cannot help but sympathise with the boy's mission and purpose, but at the same time it is he that first begins to raise doubts about the new President's own integrity -- for Moore's own purpose here to pursue the whole nature of the messiah figure. The willingness of the people to embrace one of their own -- a noir -- is understandable, desirable, especially given the apparent miraculous qualities the boy exhibits, no more visibly displayed than when he appears to deflect the bullets of would-be assassins in his own church.

But how much are Jeannot's actions governed by the will of God -- genuine heartfelt liberation theology -- how much by a power struggle with his own ego? To this end, Moore presents the president's words through his occasional conversation with the narrator and his deliberately stylised spoken addresses, leaving the frame wide open for the reader to interpret as they deem fit. It is a clever technique, never allowing us inside the mind of the messianic figure and thus never allowing us the comfort of a specific truth, blowing wide open the whole anatomy of the novel according to the specific thoughts/prejudices of the reader.

Against this though Moore weaves a second, more insidious thread, having his narrator dashing home to Canada mid-way to visit with his dying mother, only to be told on her death-bed that, after the life of a devout believer, she has come to realise all too late that there is no God, that the afterlife does not exist. There is no other life. This simply underlines doubts the priest has been harbouring, necessarily clouding his view of the supposed saint running Ganae, and draws parallels with the crisis of faith that centres Moore's other powerful religious inquiry in the face of the extraordinary, Cold Heaven.

As with all Moore's later books, and especially the last -- the superb, Booker nominated Lies Of Silence -- he hangs his questioning and ideas on the framework of a strong thriller, stripping the prose to the bone, with hard description all but extinguished. It is the ability to orchestrate the gun-blazing entertainment and sneak the moral questions in behind the bullets that so impresses and enthrals. This allows him keep up a tight, occasionally violent narrative drive, but underpins it with a provocative and searching profundity, all mastered with an enviable lightness of touch. He only stumbles once, as the second half collapses momentarily into an extended and rather aimless chase across the island, but rescues his novel from collapse with an ingenious climax using Jeannot's final address to his people, and then pushes on to a stinging coda that recalls nothing if not the blunt unforgiveness so often found in the masterful Jonathan Carroll. There is little higher praise than that.