Laying History Bare

...One of them is a mysterious organization that has dispatched hired killers with the directive to gun him down and pin the following "statement" on his dead body: "This man is Pierre Brossard, former Chief of the Second Section of the Marseilles region of the Milice, condemned to death in absentia by French courts, in 1944 and again in 1946, and further charged with a crime against humanity in the murder of 14 Jews in Dombey, Alpes-Maritimes, June 15, 1944...

...Over the next 40-odd years he remained in hiding, sheltered throughout by the Roman Catholic Church...

...After 44 years of delays, legal prevarications, and the complicity of the Catholic Church in hiding Brossard from justice, the dead are now avenged...

...As he travels about his beloved homeland ("I won't get any pan hagnat if I move to some meleque country," he ruminates), he is protected and supported by conservative Catholic clerics who have twisted the Church's tradition of asylum and sanctuary, its declared faith in confession and absolution, as a cover for their deeply-rooted anti-Semitism...

...As a priest who attended a Catholic day school with the asylum-seeking Brossard tells him: "It is the Church that still claims your allegiance, and which, by shielding you, forgives you and, in doing so, forgives itself for its silence when thousands of Jews were sent to their deaths...

...These dark hours forever sully our history and are an insult to our past and our traditions," Chirac proclaimed...

...continues to murder with little hesitation, exploit women, kick animals, manipulate and connive every minute of his base existence...

...The case is closed...

...The author is equally relentless when examining the Catholic Church, a terrain he knows intimately, having assimilated it from his childhood and explored it fearlessly throughout a writing career that has produced 20 books...

...Adding to Brossard's troubles, responsibility for his case has been transferred from the French police (who are tainted by their wartime collaboration with the Nazis) to the gendarmerie, and it is pursuing him with unswerving determination...

...In any event, Chirac has forced everyone in France—from intellectuals to members of the clergy to ordinary citizens—to face up to the bitter reality...

...Second, while the three others charged lived openly and luxuriously, benefiting from good lawyers and actually serving in high positions in postwar governments, the much less well-connected Touvier (he was essentially a small-time thug) was captured in 1989 and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994...

...Moreover, when the hunted creature is also old...

...His emphatic declaration ended over half a century of equivocation, self-delusion and outright denial...

...First, through the intercession of sympathetic Catholic clergymen, he "incredibly" (Moore's word) received a pardon from President Georges Pompidou in 1971—a move that made so great a "stink" (Moore again) he still could not emerge from hiding...

...Furthermore, at least two purportedly Jewish groups are after him...

...But what distinguishes The Statement from the ordinary thriller is its moral thrust: Moore is resolved to lay history bare in all its sordidness, to in no way absolve either the perpetrator or his protectors...

...Now, in The Statement, he indicts the Church for its conduct under the Nazis and afterward...

...it seems almost heartless to persist in what looks like a vendetta...

...Yes, the criminal folly of the occupiers was seconded by the French, by the French state...

...President Jacques Chirac publicly acknowledged his country's complicity in the mass deportations that ultimately led to the murder of 76,000 Jews...

...broken in body and spirit, and accused of a crime committed long ago...

...He exposes as well the widespread willingness to cast a net of lies, ambiguity and silence over these events for half a century after the War—until the painful and horrible truth was finally uttered out loud...

...Touvier's case was unique for two reasons...

...Those words, the most joyous in religion...

...Some years after the statute of limitations for most wartime crimes ran out in 1967...

...At age 70 he has been on the run for over four decades, driving from abbey to monastery in a car loaded with three suitcases (one filled with Nazi memorabilia that he occasionally peddles...

...It is the mandate to confront this most shameful episode in French history that serves as the moral center and animating spirit of The Statement, the engrossing new novel by the distinguished Belfast-born writer Brian Moore...

...A liberal Cardinal, seeking to limit the harm being done to the Catholic Church by revelations about its harboring a war criminal, orders all churches to close their doors to him...

...The novel's main action takes place in the south of France during the final weeks of Brossard's fugitive career, when a variety of forces converge upon him...

...The book is based on the true-life case of Paul Touvier, a former chief of intelligence in the Lyon Milice (a Vichy militia), who was sentenced to death in absentia for treason in the late 1940s...

...Master of the Return," "The Jewish War" ON JULY 16, 1995, speaking at a memorial on the site of Paris' Velodrome d'Hiver, an indoor cycling stadium where 53 years earlier French police had rounded up 13,000 Jews on Nazi orders...

...Nevertheless, by mustering his considerable intelligence, talent and experience as a novelist, and keeping focused on his objective to show the truth, Moore surmounts those obstacles...

...In The Color of Blood (1987), Moore boldly scrutinized its accommodation with ruthless Communist regimes...

...He died in prison on July 17, 1996, the only French citizen ever convicted of a crime against humanity...

...Moore's fictionalized Touvier is called Pierre Brossard...

...The novel, then, has the form of a chase story with all the excitement, tension, and suspense normally attendant to that genre...

...In Brossard he has created a character who, despite his pathetically self-indulgent faith in absolution ("Ego te absolvo," he thinks...

...The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1955), cast an unblinking eye on the Church's failure to deliver on its promise of solace for the individual...

...Despite the comforting myth perpetuated by Charles de Gaulle and others in an effort to salvage their people's honor, very few Frenchmen, after all, fought in the Resistance...

...This character, in short, remains entirely unrepentant, forever unredeemed, absolutely unredeemable...

...In addition, at the end there is a satisfying and plausible surprise...

...Moore has effectively exposed here the scandalous readiness of the Catholic Church and multitudes of French citizens, including officials, to collaborate with the Germans, actively and passively, in the persecution of the Jews...

...Jewish and Resistance groups successfully petitioned to have Touvier and three far more highly placed Vichy-era officials charged with "crimes against humanity," for which there is no such statute...

...That is an extremely delicate task for a writer doing a chase story, because the reader's natural tendency is to sympathize with the person being pursued...

...His first novel...

...He makes his argument with the authority of an insider who will not be distracted or deceived...