** spoiler alert ** Brian Moore, a Northern Irish and Canadian author, died in 1999. His works that are based upon the land of his birth are poignant and evocative of the lives of common Irish people, and he is especially skillful at understanding the lives of marginalized women.

In this novel, told by a third person omniscient narrator, Judith Hearne, an unmarried woman, orphaned young and raised by aunt now deceased, has just moved into shabby lodgings. She is apparently impecunious and a devout Roman Catholic. Her landlady, the inquisitive Mrs. Henry Rice, lives with her son Bernie, fat, indolent, disgustingly threatening. Judith is prim, prissy, punctilious and proper, wedded to routine. She stores up little stories from daily life to entertain her friends, of which she turns out to have few. The few personal items in her room (apparently centerpieces of wherever she lives) include a photo of her aunt and a picture of the Sacred Heart, the first always on the center of the mantelpiece, the latter above her bed. Soon we learn that she is plain, in her early forties, and has been educated in a Catholic convent school. Readying herself for her day, inspecting herself in her mirror, “She smiled fondly at her fondly smiling image, her nervous dark eyes searching the searching glass. Satisfied, she nodded to the nodding, satisfied face.” “Beside the door, like an old blind dog, a grandfather clock wagged away the hours.”

A fellow lodger, Madden, the object of Judith’s increasing infatuation and the recently returned from New York brother of Judith’s landlady, turns out to be a drunk, a financial failure who is living off a small compensation for having been hit by a bus in NY. An entire chapter chronicles his day, a day wasted and futile, exposing him in all his tawdriness and revealing much about him that Judith is ignorant of in her romantic daydreaming. By becoming an omniscient narrator with respect to Madden, and by the extensive use of free indirect discourse, the author contrasts Madden’s character with Judith’s fantasies about him. Moore focuses increasingly on Judith’s piety and her increasing infatuation with Madden even as he reveals more about her by having her pay her usual Sunday afternoon visit to her friends, the O’Neill family, all of the members of which clearly find her tedious and boring. The tenants in the boarding house, and landlady and her son, become increasingly critical and discerning about her.

After going to a movie Madden and Judith talk about the future; she thinks he is about to propose marriage, whereas his intent seems more obviously to suggest a business partnership so that he can get money from her. Later, at home, Judith learns that Madden has been only a hotel doorman in America, becomes disillusioned and unglued, and, succumbing to her “secret vice,” drinks herself into oblivion in her room. In the meantime, Madden rapes the servant girl, Mary. The narrative then chronicles Judith’s past life and her descent into alcoholism, as she continues on her binge in her room. Recovering from her binge, Judith seeks forgiveness and help in religion but then questions whether religion has any validity at all, reveling in what she views as “impure thoughts” but finally, in the end, retreating into religion again. Her landlady has revealed that she and the other lodgers are aware of Judith’s binge. Confronted by Judith about his distancing himself from her, Madden angrily brushes her off. Making excuse after excuse to herself, Judith’s drinking continues as her world progressively crumbles.

Religion in this book provides no comfort, no lasting strength, and is only the source of mindless conformity, social strictures and condemnation. Life is lived with a constant sense of guilt and personal inadequacy, an awareness of meanness and limited horizons. The effect in this society is claustrophobic and tawdry. Moore has sensitive intuition regarding the lives and feelings of his characters and an exquisite ability to convey their inner lives to his readers.

Judith indulges herself in another binge in her room, having started drinking elsewhere. Now the whole establishment breaks in and sees her, witnessing her dissolution and degradation. She behaves offensively and is asked to leave the rooming house. Going to church for confession, she is put off by the perfunctory nature of her interaction with the priest, and the remnants of her slipping faith slide away, leaving her in a state of grief, regret, and utter despondency. Her state is aggravated by her physical symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. Her permanent crutch, her religion, the ostensible foundation of her life and Irish society, is being discovered to be a futile and uncaring fraud, a mindless habit and nothing more than that. She draws almost all of her money out of the bank, buys several bottles of whiskey and gin, and checks into a hotel. A visit to her old friend, sick with arthritis and alcoholism in a convent nursing home, ends badly when they are caught drinking gin. Judith is desperately looking for a person to connect to, someone who will listen to her. Stopping at the home of the only “conventional” friends she has, Judith drunkenly burns that bridge, too. The picture is both pathetic and maudlin, and one both feels sorry for her and does not.

Returning to the church, she tries to talk with the priest about her lack of faith, but because she is drunk he scolds her and tells her to come back sober. Instead, she enters the sanctuary and tries to open the altar container holding the Host to see whether God will strike her, which would be a visible sign of God’s existence. Failing to do so, she collapses in delirium, imagining that the priest and two worshipers trying to restrain her are God, the Virgin, and Saint Joseph. Confined now to a nursing home, Judith is necessarily sober but listless and depressed, her occasional visitors - her conventional friend, her priest - offering nothing but transparent platitudes. In the nursing home she refuses to participate in Mass. “If you did not believe, then how many things…seem different. Everything: lives, hopes, devotions, thoughts. If you do not believe, you are alone. But I was of Ireland, among my people, a member of my faith. Now I have no - and if no faith, then no people.” Alone at last in her solitary room, she puts up the pictures of her aunt and the Sacred Heart, as she has always done in whatever room she finds herself, knowing that the latter is only a picture without underlying reality, and also knowing that she will never leave.