TO AVENGE OR TO FORGET THE PAST?

By Paul Gray

Given a scene in which an assassin stalks a potential victim, most readers will, in the absence of other evidence, instinctively root for the quarry. In the opening pages of his new novel, The Statement (Dutton; 250 pages; $22.95), Brian Moore provides just such a scene: in a village in the south of France an old man is being tailed by a hired killer. The murder, the assassin decides, will take place when his target drives back to the monastery where he has been staying. Feigning engine trouble along the route, he waits for the old man to stop, then approaches as if to ask for a lift, pulls out a pistol and is fatally shot twice in the chest by the man he planned to kill.

This sort of narrative turnaround usually provides the pleasure of surprise, the sense that poetic justice has foiled a malevolent act. Moore quickly cuts off such easy certainties. He shows the old man examining the possessions of his would-be murderer. They include a printed statement identifying the intended victim as "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." The statement goes on to say that Brossard was charged with the massacre of 14 Jews on June 15, 1945. The document, which the old man realizes was to be pinned on his body, concludes, "The case is closed."

Not true, of course, because the old man--who is indeed Brossard, although he has called himself Pouliot for many years--survives. But who, in 1989, still wants to punish him for his past by killing him? Brossard assumes that Jewish money is behind this attempt on his life. That belief, a measure of his reflexive anti-Semitism, will have fatal consequences.

The Statement may have a classic thriller's plot--a character on the run, private power plays behind public facades--but it unfolds in a moral universe infinitely more complex and compromised than the white hats vs. the black hats so typical of the genre. The novel asks not only who is trying to murder Brossard but also why Brossard has been able to remain in France for 44 years, receiving asylum from various Roman Catholic monasteries, and a 1971 presidential pardon for the crimes he committed during the German occupation and the Vichy regime.

"It is hard to pass judgment on what people did back then," says a French army colonel who is also looking to bring Brossard to justice. This remark is the crux of the novel. Does a time come when people must be forgiven for doing what they mistakenly believed was right or unavoidable? Or should evil never be forgiven or forgotten? By challenging the reader to confront these questions, The Statement is ultimately unforgettable.

--By Paul Gray