Novel ways to miss the Booker Prize

I met Brian Moore on the day the Booker Prize shortlist was announced. He was in London for the publication of The Magician's Wife, his 20th novel. Later in the day it emerges that the author's gut pessimism about the shortlist is correct. "I've been on three times," he says, "and the last time I was told that people who have been on three times always tend to be dropped." One year he got very close to victory, but was overtaken at the finishing line. "I apparently had a majority vote, and one of the judges absolutely dug her heels in and refused to concede the prize to this rotten book."

The version I've heard is that the two women on the panel, in their determination to overturn the three men who had voted for Moore, went into a conclave and agreed to deploy tactical weeping. Another judge, widely noted for courtesy rather than critical acumen, fell for the ruse and changed his vote.

The irony is that no male novelist has written more consistently from a woman's viewpoint. "Most of them don't try," says Moore. "I've always thought that any great novelist has got to be able to write both sexes." His debut, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, told of a Belfast alcoholic who conjures up a love affair in her imagination. The 26-year-old Moore was loathe to write about "a young Catholic intellectual losing his faith. I thought, why don't I write about someone who might have been a friend of my mother's and make it a woman?" In the 50 years since, he has come face to face with Nazi depravity, British royalty and Hollywood extremity in circumstances that other writers would have gratefully recycled as fiction. But Moore is no Hemingway, viscerally reporting on his own extraordinary roamings.

His first Booker nomination, The Doctor's Wife, was also told from a woman's point of view. Mrs Harold Wilson, chairing the judges, objected that it had "too much PD", which turned out to be her squeamish acronym for Physical Detail. There's a lot more PD in The Magician's Wife, although not the lubricious sort which must have embarrassed Mrs Wilson. The first half of the novel is largely a tour round the lavish court of Napoleon III at Compiegne, a place of petty hierarchy and bombastic ritual seen through the fresh eyes of a woman whose husband's skills - he is a famous magician - the state wishes to use in its conquest of Algeria. The Lamberts are wooed at a week-long serie, and young Emmeline is obliged to commission 21 dresses to see her safely through. Moore claims to be a lazy researcher, "but I did find an amazing book called In The Courts of Memory by Countess something or other. She was an American woman married to a banker, and they had been invited to Compiegne, so she was writing letters to her mother telling her about the dresses at the balls". The dresses, he freely admits, are intricately described photocopies of those worn by Countess something or other.

The second half of the novel transplants us to Algeria. Lambert's mission is to demonstrate, with his box of tricks, that while an Islamic holy man claims to have God-given powers which will protect his troops in war, divinity is in fact batting for the French. Emmeline, trapped in a sexless marriage and fired up by escapist African fantasies that have afflicted many an impressionable tourist before and since, comes to view her husband not only as a charlatan but as an agent of repression.

Moore had his own encounter with Algeria in wartime. "One of my earliest memories was going into a narrow street and seeing a man sitting on what I thought was a huge rubber bag which turned out to be his balls. He was sitting on this disease! The third night I woke up to these terrible screams and ran outside to see a thief being electrocuted on the wires." While the theme of Moore's career is an evasion of autobiography, there's a clear through-line connecting this recollection to Lambert's deployment of electro-magnetic technology to terrify his gullible Algerian audience.

There is an ideological face off in The Magician's Wife between Christianity's constant appeals to God for favours and Islam's acceptance "that your life is written for you and whatever God sends you is right". Though born a Catholic, Moore seems to have led his life along curiously Islamic lines, allowing experience to bump into him rather than seeking it out.

Once upon a time he was a British subject of nationalist stock. His uncle was the first commander-in-chief of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, then education minister in De Valera's government, but these sympathies were somehow omitted from the young Moore's genes. "At that time, like many people of my generation, I was sick of the old theocratic state that they formed in southern Ireland and of them talking about what had happened in 1916."

During the war he more or less fled Belfast, drawing the line at joining the British army but enlisting instead in the British Ministry of War Transport, with whom he served all over the Mediterranean. In 1946, to avoid going back to Ulster, he joined the UN to distribute agricultural supplies to Poland. Here he happened to be an onlooker at the trial of Hoess, the commander of Auschwitz. He recalls a swarthy, un-Aryan figure who "just stood in the dock and the witnesses would go past and spit at him. He never made any comment but at the end I was there when the judge said, `You are responsible for the death of at least a million people. What have you got to say for yourself?' And he just looked out at the court and said, `I am a German officer. I obeyed my orders.' That was his only comment. It was terribly chilling."

Moore's next caper was to chase a girlfriend to Canada.

Penniless when she rejected him, he had to stay. His high Irish connections got him a job proof-reading on the Montreal Gazette, then reporting: he covered Princess Elizabeth's first Canadian tour, then interviewed the VIPs who passed through Montreal, "people like Mae West, and Harold Wilson" (whose wife would later object to his PD).

He unwillingly circulated in literary New York for seven years, then moved to his present home in Malibu with his second wife in 1966, but he has remained a Canadian citizen, and still summers in Nova Scotia. "I just never had the slightest desire to be an American. The interesting thing is I realise more and more as I become older that I am Irish."

The thing is, you'd never guess this from his novels. Some early ones were set in Belfast - The Emperor of Ice Cream, The Feast of Lupercal - and in one of several recent excursions into the thriller genre, in Lies of Silence he returned to consider the effects of IRA terrorism on an ordinary couple. But Ireland has mostly stalked his fiction as an obliquity, a buried metaphor. Like Hitchcock (for whom Moore wrote Torn Curtain) taking cameos in his own movies, Ireland is always there, somewhere. The Testament is about the French church's protection of a Vichy regime murderer. No Other Life tells of America's involvement in somewhere very like Haiti. And now, from yet another angle, The Magician's Tale tackles the vexed issue of colonialism, and an indigenous people's right to self-determination.

Moore's borrowed pied-a-terre in Knightsbridge has a view of Hyde Park. Just as he is talking about how his republican roots prevented him from joining the British Army in the war, he interrupts himself and says, "I just want to show you something. It happens every morning". On the other side of the window, ten mounted horsemen of the Household Cavalry are trotting past. These are men from the very regiment which was successfully targeted on the same route several years ago by the IRA. If you put such a glib juxtaposition in a novel, the critics would murder you.