Black Robe, an account of the seventeenth-century encounter between the Huron and Iroquois that the French called “Les Sauvages” and the French Jesuit missionaries that the native people called “Blackrobes,” is Brian Moore’s most striking book. No other novel has so well captured both the intense—and disastrous—strangeness of each culture to one another, and their equal extraordinariness to our own understanding.