The Statement.

On the morning I finished Brian Moore's powerful new novel, The Statement, Paul Touvier's obituary appeared in the newspaper. Touvier, an official in the Vichy regime during the Second World War, died in prison - the only Frenchman ever convicted of "crimes against humanity." His story was more than usually toxic, since he had been sheltered in Roman Catholic religious communities and monasteries during the years he was in hiding. In addition, not long before Touvier's unlamented death, Abbe Pierre, an old priest revered throughout France for his work with the poor, beat a retreat to an Italian Benedictine monastery in response to the outcry that met his support of a book, written by a friend, that challenged the authenticity of the Holocaust.

In The Statement, Brian Moore once again (as he did in The Color of Blood and No Other Life) displays his sixth sense for isolating the most vulnerable points of contact between human affairs and divine providence as it is mediated through the all-too-human functionaries of the Catholic church. Moore builds his narrative on some of the architecture of Paul Touvier's life, creating an evil web of complicities among men who act as if they can revive the old certainties that once secured France for Catholics and Caucasians. Then he shows how fragile a web can be.

Pierre Brossard, a cagy septuagenarian, has been on the lam for almost twenty years. At the behest of sympathetic church authorities, the Elysee Palace had engineered a pardon for Brossard's wartime crimes. However, the consequent publicity opens new avenues of investigation that jeopardize others whose respectability and comfort, unlike Brossard's, have never been compromised by their behavior during the war. Brossard is indicted for ordering the deaths of fourteen Jews at Dombey - a crime against humanity for which there is no statute of limitations, and both the government and the church recognize it is time to pull the plug on an embarrassing episode. At the same time, Brossard is apparently being hunted by a Jewish commando unit impatient with the pace of conventional justice. When it is clear that they are acting on inside information, Brossard feels a new kind of pressure and calls in his chips from every pocket of the reactionary conspiracy that has sustained him in his internal exile.

Suddenly the catacombs - the "underground" sanctuaries that, ironically in this novel, hide the murderer rather than the prey - are perilous. With the forces of the modern church in alliance with the state's system of justice (significantly represented by the gendarmerie, not by the regular police), Brossard's confidence wanes and in the impenetrable murkiness of his heart he pursues a kind of forgiveness, as well as a way out of his predicament. "Ego te absolvo. Those words, the most joyous in religion....Confession was the greatest sacrament of the church, a passport out of the flames of hell." Brossard is a narcissist. He is assuaged by the words of absolution and undeterred by the expectation of reform. He has been cosseted and financially supported by sympathetic abbots, minor ecclesiastical functionaries, and an anti-Semitic, revanchist "order," the Chevaliers de Ste. Marie. They all share Brossard's embittered memories "'of the church as it was in France when we were boys. It was a church that saw modern society as an insult against God's laws, a church that was antidemocratic, filled with clerics and laymen who would think of you [Brossard] as the victim of a plot by those Jews, freemasons, Communists, whom we were taught to fear and despise.'" For all of his running, Brossard is most a fugitive from the truth.

His hatred for Jews, racial minorities, and anything progressive has created an inner life so knotted that all connection to the truth has been abrogated. When he was sentenced to death in absentia immediately after the war, he was forced into petty criminality. When finally arrested, he betrayed old friends and, in exchange, was allowed to escape. The police clearly recognized someone whose moral flexibility would be of much greater service to them on the streets than in prison. Brossard has no concept of the imprisonment his freedom entails and continues to act the Judas, as required.

Brossard breathes an air so thick with betrayals that his instincts for survival eventually suffocate. Where one might expect moral light, Brossard finds insipid priests, who only in the face of indisputable realities admit the possibility of previous excesses. About the death camps, Brossard's confessor, Monsignor LeMoyne, reflects, "The numbers of dead are exaggerated, no doubt, but what matter? Sin is sin in any number." The monsignor is as facile at forgiving himself - and, by implication, all those who acted in "good faith" by collaborating with the German occupiers - as he is tireless in trying to secure forgiveness, whether sacramental or civil, for his protege.

Brossard, however, is unforgivable. In Moore's telling, his penitence is as vain as the church's forgiveness.

Perfidy abounds in this novel: in Rome and Paris, in the highest echelons of government, and in monastic enclosures. The Statement is played out in the shadows. Survival - for those pursued by the truths of history, including those allegedly sensitive to the consequences of Judgment - depends upon prevarication and masquerade.

J.V. Long lives in Portland, Oregon, and is a doctoral candidate in English at Stanford University.