THE ADVERSARY: A TRUE STORY OF MONSTROUS DECEPTION
by Emmanuel Carrère
translated by Linda Coverdale
Stoddart, 191pp.
"On the Saturday morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our eldest son." This is the clever opening sentence in Emmanuel Carrère's spare account of multiple murders. Clever in that it sets up a parallel between the lives of the subject and author, and also, in the name Gabriel, hints at the particularly Christian perplexity in store.
At the heart of this true crime chronicle is an absence. Romand, the subject and willing correspondent of Carrère, the Parisian author of The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, survived in a vacuum for 18 years until he moved into murderous action. He led the make-believe life of a distinguished doctor at the World Health Organization in Geneva. How does one forge a luxurious existence, or even subsist, while leading a make-believe life? Romand put the word out that his position at the WHO enabled him to invest at 18 per cent – family and friends lined up to hand over hundreds of thousands of francs.
Carrère is deeply uncomfortable about the compulsion that has led him to write this book. Perhaps to remove himself, he creates chapters written from the points of view of Romand's closest friend, Luc; his wife, Florence; and his mistress, Corinne. Into this chronology, Carrère asks how Romand could have lived this life, how he could have made so many lies seem quite so real.
The story becomes stranger once Romand becomes enmeshed with a Catholic movement called the Intercessors. Carrère writes, "He is not putting on an act of that I am sure, but isn't the liar inside him putting one over on him? When Christ enters his heart, when the certainty of being loved in spite of everything makes tears of joy run down his cheeks, isn't it the adversary deceiving him yet again?"
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