The Luck of Ginger Coffey by Brian Moore

First published: 1960

Type of work: Domestic realism

Time of work: The late 1950’s

Locale: Montreal, Canada

Principal Characters:

• James Francis (Ginger) Coffey, the protagonist, an Irish immigrant in search of work
• Veronica (Vera) Coffey, his wife
• Pauline (Paulie) Coffey, his daughter
• Gerald (Gerry) Grosvenor, Ginger’s friend, in love with Veronica
• Mr. Brott, the president of Tiny Ones, a diaper service
• MacGregor, the managing editor of the newspaper that hires Ginger as a proofreader

The Novel

The Luck of Ginger Coffey was Brian Moore’s third novel, and its setting is the Canada of the late 1950’s, a promising new world for immigrants willing to try their luck north of the Canadian-American border. Like Moore himself, James Francis (Ginger) Coffey has arrived in Canada from Ireland, certain that this land of opportunity will recognize his innate abilities and provide him and his family with a better life. As the story opens, however, Ginger is on the verge of a harsh confrontation with reality. Broke, unemployed, and caught in a snowballing series of lies to his wife, Veronica, he has spent their savings to pay off several debts and has no money to purchase the family’s return tickets to Ireland—a fact which forces him to make one last, desperate attempt to find a job.

The reality of Ginger’s situation, however, is that he is actually qualified for very little, and his employment applications are a shaky construction of half-truths and exaggerations. Over the course of several days, his problems worsen as he is forced to accept a low-paying proofreader’s job and later learns that Gerald (Gerry) Grosvenor, the friend who helped him obtain the position, may be having an affair with his wife. When Veronica leaves him to seek a life of her own, Ginger finds his private world unraveling rapidly and his dreams of success in Canada fading. Now jealous of the affections of the wife he had come to take for granted and pained by the loss of closeness with his teenage daughter, Paulie, Ginger throws himself into his work with newfound determination. Securing a second job as a driver for a diaper delivery service, he persuades Paulie to move with him into a small flat that he has rented. His encounters with Veronica and Gerry remain anguished and embarrassing, however, and Paulie’s primary reason for choosing to live with her father seems to be the freedom from supervision that his overworked schedule affords her.

Concern for their daughter’s welfare leads Veronica to move back in with her family on a temporary basis, a turn of events which Ginger hopes will lead to a permanent reconciliation. Veronica, however, is bitterly disillusioned after years of listening to her husband’s grandiose plans, and Ginger, stung by her criticism, promises her that if the promotion from proofreader to reporter that he expects does not take place, he will withdraw from her life and leave her to Gerry. The promotion does fall through, and Ginger is arrested, after leaving a bar, for relieving himself in front of a hotel. After a night in jail and a suspended sentence, he is reunited with Veronica, who now believes in the sincerity of his feelings for her and who has broken with Gerry after he reacted callously to Ginger’s arrest. Realizing. that he will never achieve more in life than a modest existence, Ginger decides to accept a desk job with the diaper service, effectively lowering his sights but regaining his family and finally accepting his own limitations.

The Characters

The Luck of Ginger Coffey has an intriguing figure as its central character. Ginger is an amiable, well-meaning, but deeply flawed man, unable to relinquish his own dreams of grandeur even when his family’s financial welfare is at stake. Moore has drawn him in many regards as a quintessential Irishman, full of charm and blarney, fond of an occasional whiskey, and given to wearing a jaunty Tyrolean hat with a small feather in its brim. Yet Ginger lacks the fatalism of many of his countrymen, and it is his optimism that has led him to emigrate to Canada, where he hopes to leave his undistinguished past behind him and start afresh.

Ginger has come to Montreal as the representative for three Irish firms, all of which soon dispense with his service upon learning that the gulf between his claims of expertise and his actual abilities is very wide indeed. It is a setback which is symptomatic of Ginger’s character flaws in general, for well-intentioned though he may be, he is at heart irresponsible and self-deluding—traits which have devastating repercussions in his personal life.

Moore reveals much of Ginger’s personality through his character’s thoughts, and the portrait that emerges is one of a proud, emotional man whose ability to rationalize, rather than understand, his setbacks allows him little room for personal growth. Throughout the book, Ginger repeatedly hides his failures from Veronica and Paulie, seemingly unaware that their respect for him will plummet when they discover his deception. His dishonesty results from his own need to believe in himself as a man of great talent and potential, and his false pride leads him to refuse a promotion from the one character who shares his belief—Mr. Brott of the diaper service—because he believes that a job as Brott’s assistant would be no better than his former positions in Ireland. So great are Ginger’s powers of self-deception that he quits his job as a driver in anticipation of his promotion from proofreader to reporter—a profession for which he has no qualifications.

The most direct recipient of the fallout from Ginger’s behavior is his long-suffering wife, Veronica. Moore shows Veronica only through Ginger’s eyes, first as a critical, unhappy wife and later as a working woman who has suddenly become desirable to her husband again by virtue of her new independence and another man’s attraction to her. Yet Moore manages to convey the frustration of Veronica’s situation: the wife who has gradually lost faith in her husband’s abilities as a provider and who sees his empty promises for what they are, and the woman who blossoms with the attentions of another man. If Veronica seems at times caustic and angry in Ginger’s view, it is clear to the reader that a lifetime of disappointment has left its mark.

Ginger and Veronica’s daughter, Paulie, remains as self-absorbed and essentially unknowable as any adolescent girl appears to a bewildered father. Although Ginger adores his only child, Paulie’s world now consists largely of boyfriends and friends from school. The only fact that seems clear about her is the danger she runs of falling in with what most parents would term a “bad crowd.” Paulie’s function within the novel is primarily as a focus for Ginger’s feelings of despair at the disintegration of his family.

Gerry, Ginger’s erstwhile friend and rival for Veronica, is also only sketchily defined. A successful political cartoonist, he represents the level of wealth and achievement to which Ginger aspires; the true depth of his feelings for Veronica, which she later dismisses as lust, remains unclear.

Better drawn among the minor characters are Ginger’s coworkers. Fox, the lame, grizzled veteran proofreader, and MacGregor, the hot-tempered, Scottish managing editor of the paper, both emerge as vivid characters, as does Mr. Brott, the shrewd, plainspoken head of the diaper company. Perhaps the most important secondary character, however, is Warren K. Wilson, whom Ginger meets during his brief stay at the YMCA. Wilson is in some ways an exaggerated version of Ginger, filled with dreams and ambitions that will almost certainly come to nothing and entering middle age still clinging to the fantasies and attitudes of adolescence. Ginger recognizes an element of himself in Wilson and senses a lack of some crucial quality in the man. Ginger at least has narrowed the focus of his dreams to include the reality of a family, although not until the end of the book does he achieve maturity, by abandoning the dreams of his youth.

Critical Context

Like many of Brian Moore’s novels, The Luck of Ginger Coffey tells the story of a character whose convictions are shaken by a personal crisis. Moore often favors a structure in which his central character is presented with events or information which sorely test his understanding of his place in the world. The character’s subsequent attempts at reevaluation form the heart of the story, often leaving him disillusioned but still functioning within a workable, if radically altered, belief system. Although several of the author’s works—including Catholics (1972), Cold Heaven (1983), and Black Robe (1985)—deal specifically with a crisis of religious faith, Ginger Coffey’s dilemma is somewhat different. A lapsed Catholic, like Moore himself, his is a crisis of faith in himself, a development that ultimately proves to be no less devastating.

The novel also parallels Moore’s own experience as an Irishman who emigrated to Canada in his late twenties, although clearly Moore’s own talents far outshone his protagonist’s more limited abilities. The Luck of Ginger Coffey was made into a film in 1964 with Robert Shaw starring in the title role, and Moore himself providing the screenplay.

Bibliography

Commonweal. Review. LXXIII (September 30, 1960), p. 20.

New Statesman. Review. LX (August 27, 1960), p. 282.

The New York Times Book Review. Review. September 4, 1960, p. 16.

The New Yorker. Review. XXXVI (August 13, 1960), p. 103.

Saturday Review. Review. XLIII (August 27, 1960), p. 12.

Time. Review. LXXVI (August 29, 1960), p. 70.

The Times Literary Supplement. Review. September 2, 1960, p. 557.