The Statement: 8

Seventy-year-old Pierre Brossard, a former pro-Fascist militia officer, has five decades in hiding, with the aid of church and government officials but suddenly finds himself the target of a new breed of government official and justice-seeking assassins. 35,000 first printing. Tour.

While Moore's new novel can be called a thriller, it is in fact another of his stunning moral visions of modern life (Lies of Silence; The Colors of Blood) that have marked him as an astute, impassioned chronicler of 20th-century spiritual malaise. Here he has taken inspiration from a real situation, that of a former pro-Nazi Vichy military officer, Maurice Papon, who for four decades evaded punishment for his complicity in WWII crimes against Jews. Moore's antihero is called Pierre Brossard. He is introduced to us as an apparently nervous old man who travels only with a suitcase and a prayer. But he is soon revealed as a ruthless, twisted fascist whose piousness hides a vicious core of bigotry. Under the protection of an intricate web of aging Nazi collaborators and extreme conservatives entrenched in the Catholic Church, he has eluded capture for 44 years. We follow him as a secret terrorist organization attempts to exact final vengeance for his wartime crimes and discover that not one ounce of contrition shadows his mind. A wily and murderous veteran of the game, Brossard eliminates his would-be assassins and re-exposes his case to the world, with shocking results. The chase is riveting, and Moore's exploration of the chilling self-righteousness behind Brossard's reasoning is provocative and disturbing, showing how hatred can spew its own, distorted rationality. In the end, Moore extrapolates from real life a masterful puzzle of spiritual and historical dimensions.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A superlative political novel that, like its immediate predecessors, Lies of Silence (1990) and No Other Life (1993), blends the visceral appeal of a beautifully plotted thriller with the more complex pleasures of a thoughtful exploration of conflicting and long-lingering moral quandaries. ``The statement'' is an explanatory declaration that is to be pinned to the body of 70-year-old Pierre Brossard, a former officer in the ``Milice'' that carried out the Vichy government's WW II policy of collaboration with the Nazis, and a known murderer of Jews. This will be done, that is, if Brossard is found first by the underground Jewish group that seeks his death ``because they believe he will never be brought to trial,'' rather than by the officials in the French government who want him captured alive. But Brossard has survived for 40 years on the run, given sanctuary and tacit approval by his country's Catholic Church, and perhaps supported by highly placed collaborators like himself who could no longer be protected should his crimes come to public attention. This brilliant premise is developed with breathtaking skill, as Moore--who has few peers as a lucid explicator of convoluted narrative materials--adroitly shifts his focus among the harried Brossard (as certain of God's forgiveness as he is of his undimmed, murderous anti-Semitism), his various pursuers, and the several clerics, high and low, who have persuaded themselves that ``the Church's law of asylum supersedes . . . the laws of the civil authority.'' The novel's characterizations are deftly etched, its issues are treated with complete fairness, and the suspense is maintained until the last possible moment, when a stunning surprise confronts us on the final page. Moore here engages Graham Greene and John le Carr‚ on their own ground, producing a haunting, heartpounding literary thriller of which either would be proud. They don't write them any better than this. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Moore's engrossing new novel dramatizes the narrow escapes and glaring self-deceptions of a 70-year-old Catholic Frenchman, Pierre Brossard, who is being newly pursued for his participation, while a member of the Vichy-affiliated Milici during World War II, in the execution of Jews. Brossard was officially pardoned in 1971 by the French president, but soon afterwards he was condemned internationally for "crimes against humanity." He has remained a fugitive ever since, receiving asylum at various sympathetic Catholic monasteries and abbeys in France. Moore adeptly weaves an increasingly taut plot centered on how and why the government and a group of assassins are suddenly pursuing Brossard, pointedly exposing a fundamental contradiction in Brossard's character: between an ever-more-urgent desire to appear repentant in God's eyes for his crimes and a persistent self-justification for those crimes. Members of the Catholic clergy and the French government who have been giving Brossard money and refuge are afflicted by analogous failures of self-recognition; their involvement in the novel's climax gives this story a cautionary edge. Jim O'Laughlin

Moore's 18th novel (following No Other Life, LJ 8/93) is the story of Pierre Broussard, a 70-year-old Vichy collaborator now wanted for crimes against humanity. After 40 years of hiding in various French monasteries, Broussard suddenly finds himself chased by both the gendarmerie and assassins. Moore sketches his characters too lightly for the reader to care about them and telegraphs the ending in the first 90 pages, giving the reader little reason to continue. Ultimately, Moore asks for too much suspension of disbelief. Who, for instance, might benefit from the assassination of a 70-year-old Vichy collaborator? Recommended for large popular collections only.?Katherine Holmes, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.