The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception by Emmanuel Carrère
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Crème de la Crime

Jean-Claude Romand killed his wife, two children and his mother and father in a French village not far from Geneva in 1993. Six years later Emmanuel Carrère finished a book about the murders. This is all we know for sure: the dead bodies, the book and the chronology of two sets of events. And therein lies the mystery posed by Carrère.

Is the book fact or fiction? Carrère makes it purposely ambiguous by telling the reader that his ambitions to write a psychological assessment of Romand were thwarted early on by Romand’s unreponsiveness. So he wrote the present book instead. As with Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood, actual events are supplemented by conjectures and conjunctions. The boundaries aren’t clear so that all but the general outlines of the story are in that Borgesian territory in which fictions pose with factual passports and vice versa. The reader is never certain of the literary nationality of any statement. Alien spies could be lurking anywhere.

The implications of Carrère’s technique are clear: Any attempt to understand, to explain, to analyse the behaviour of Jean-Claude Romand inevitably involves fiction. The newspaper accounts of the killings, the forensic medical reports, the psychiatric diagnoses, and even the first person statements of Romand are all fiction in their own way. Carrere‘s book is a sort of meta-fiction which brings all the details together. If he adds a few details here and there, it’s only to make things flow more smoothly. The rest is incomprehensible without the touch of an accomplished story teller. N'est-ce pas?

And besides, isn’t such meta-fiction precisely what constituted the life of Jean-Claude Romand. He lived an apparently conventional life, the facts of which - wife, children, house, social involvement - were visible and verifiable to his family, neighbours, and friends. These existential truths were supplemented with other hearsay reports by Romand - about career, travel, qualifications, responsibilities - which were further transmitted by mutual acquaintances until they were part of a shared communal reality. Romand had only to supply some minor narrative connections in the form of tactical name-dropping and the occasional trinket from some foreign place (obtained in cosmopolitan Geneva) to complete his entirely bogus biography.

Meaning requires narrative, which demands a point of view, which cannot by definition be factual. Ergo, meaning is an imposition of fiction on the world of pure existence. It’s that simple and that complicated. Meaning can’t be found in events - educational background, family history, economic class, emotional profile or childhood behaviour - or in other minds, or for that matter in one’s own mind since it doesn’t exist as a thing until it is communicated, at which point it is in nobody’s mind and everyone’s simultaneously. Refusal to recognise this mystery causes a great deal of trouble. Whatever Romand did only has meaning after the fact, which really doesn’t help to explain why he did it except as a fiction that makes everyone involved, including Romand, feel safer.

Carrère recognises the paradox of his undertaking. He is whistling in the dark for the rest of us. Whatever insights he or the others who have been appalled by Romand’s actions come up with are actually sterile. They are not about the facts of the case, much less truth. The point of his book, as well as all the underlying material which he uses to construct it, is to promote the idea that the world is an orderly place, that it can be trusted even if there are the occasional dangers. Part of this trust is the feeling that we can learn things - like how to spot potential homicidal maniacs - which might expand the realm of order in our lives.

In short, Romand’s was a haute bourgeois crime, a sort of crème de la crime. And it demanded therefore a suitably haute bourgeois exposition. Carrère both does and does not supply it. Teflon was never so slippery.

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