Gods and monsters

>> Emmanuel Carrère's The Adversary delves into the world of a murderous French psychopath

by JULIET WATERS

I was hooked by Emmanuel Carrère's The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by the end of the third sentence:

"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. He was five years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand did with his, whom he killed after their meal."

It only dawned on me gradually that Carrère's elegant, penetrating little tour de force wasn't fiction. Romand is currently serving a life sentence, eligible for parole in 2015, when he will be 61. One of France's most notorious murderers, for much of his life he maintained a false identity as a respected humanitarian doctor.

If one is to believe Romand's story, he is a pathological coward whose path of deception began with one stupid lie that became an impossibly tangled web. His only escape was to murder the family who he felt would be traumatized by the revelation of his fraudulence.

For reasons that are still murky (Romand tells different versions to different people), he did not write his second-year medical exams, but told his friends and family he passed. No one bothered to check, and through a series of clever innocuous frauds Romand managed to maintain his second-year med-school status for years, allowing him to continue going to classes and pretending to complete his studies as a doctor.

The persona he created as a successful researcher with the World Health Organization inspired his parents, his in-laws, his uncle and his friends to trust him with money which they believed he was investing in Geneva. By all accounts, Romand seems to have been a loving husband, father and son, except for his mythomania. Not only does he kill his family to "protect" them, but he kills the family dog to spare the animal grief. Bizzarely, it is only the memory of the dog that sends him into a fit of remorse during the trial.

Just as gradually as it dawned on me that this was non-fiction, it also began to dawn on me that there is only so much truth that can be unearthed in the biography of a compulsive liar. But what drove Romand eventually ceases to be the most compelling mystery. As one reviewer described it, The Adversary is more of a "theological thriller." The true mystery is really how we deal with Romand's brand of evil.

Even to this day Romand seems to be the Chauncy Gardner of murderers. The imprisoned leader of a gang remembers once being picked up hitch-hiking by Romand, who gave him 200 francs for a meal. Thus he is protected in prison from the treatment normally accorded child murderers. Romand has found a jogging partner in a former mayor of Grenoble, jailed for corruption. The prison authorities have granted him special status after discovering that Romand has a calming influence on difficult prisoners. Romand has found God and a group of wealthy, devout Catholic sponsors, who will no doubt take care of him when he is released.

But as Carrère brilliantly articulates, the price of Romand's good fortune may be his soul. Is grace what Romand really needs? Or is it to face the depression he has been avoiding all his life, his only chance of connecting with authentic remorse and, hopefully, reality? "He is not putting on an act, of that I'm 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 [Carrère's name for Satan] deceiving him yet again?"

The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, by Emmanuel Carrère, Stoddart, hc, 191pp, $28.95