Title: The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception
Genre: True Crime
Author: Emmanuel Carrère
First published in France in 2000 as “L’Adversaire”, an English translation followed a year later. Here is the first sentence on page one:
“On 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.”
Chilling enough you might think, but Romand wasn’t quite finished. After carrying out these killings, he moved on to his childhood home to dispatch his aged and infirm parents, to conclude his murderous spree. But this book is not really about the murders themselves; instead it concentrates on Romand’s extraordinary double life and his arresting psychopathy.
At the centre of the book is an amazing, almost unbelievable, long running deception that Romand perpetrates on everybody he comes in contact with over an eighteen year period. Commencing in September 1975, he meticulously constructs a false life which he then shows to the outside world, and amazingly even his own family are taken in, right up until the murders in 1993, when the whole edifice comes tumbling down around his ears.
If any budding novelist tried to pitch this story as a plot for a novel, they’d get laughed out of the room, because no sane person could believe such a thing was possible. Then again, maybe its just a French thing? Perhaps they are just not as nosy as other races.
The deception starts when Romand fails to take an examination for medical students, and then when the pass lists are pinned up, he simply tells everyone he has passed, and no one checks the lists or doubts him. Later he lies about qualifying as a doctor, where none of the other medical students or indeed his young wife question this even though he is living intimately amongst them. He then tells everyone he has landed a big job as a research scientist at the World Health Organisation, just across the border in Geneva. Unbelievably, he then, for years, pretends, to his wife, his children, family and close friends, that he is working there everyday. So each day he gets up and ostensibly goes off to work, when in fact what he is often doing is simply driving somewhere, finding a cafe, bar, library or even just a lay-by, and stopping off and reading books or newspapers. He sets up a telephone answering service for anyone who might call him at work and then just gets on with it, year after year.
He is helped by generous and gullible parents and relatives who entrust large sums of money to him to “manage” which he then uses to live on, given that he has no salary. Eventually, when people start asking for their money back, it all starts to unravel, but it takes years.
It is a fascinating story and Emmanuel Carrère is a very fine writer who does it full justice. Some have compared the book to Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”, and I wouldn’t disagree with that.
The one false note I found was at the beginning where Carrère uses a novelists device, no doubt to increase the dramatic impact of the story (as if it was needed!), where he gives the impression that Romand was some kind of Alpha male, looked up to by the community within which he lived. Yet as the trial proceeds, we learn that this could not really have been the case. He comes across as a rather troubled, neurotic, insecure, colourless and physically unattractive character.
Nevertheless this is a truly gripping and fascinating read, and worth a couple of hours of anybodies time – its a very short book!
Can't stop the train better let it roll on... 