Empathy with the devil: “The
Adversary is not just an account of a murder in the ‘true crime’
genre. Carrère had initially planned to write it like that, to
construct his own In Cold Blood out of this minor news item. But
he found that to ‘erase’ himself from the narrative as Truman
Capote had done was ‘dishonest’. He had to deal with his
obsession with the murder, and give an account, as he puts it,
‘of my relationship to this story – my impressions, my
hypotheses, my doubts, my anxieties’. In order to be truly
honest, in other words, he had to implicate himself.

‘On the morning of Saturday January 9,
1993,’ the book begins, ‘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. He
was five years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we
went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand
did with his, whom he killed after the meal.’ ” Guardian/Observer booksunlimited