Rating: 
Summary: Religious-political thriller par excellence
Review: Both suspenseful and revelatory, Moore's story of the search for 70-year-old Maurice Brossard, a man who believes he acted righteously when he killed fourteen Jews chosen at random in Dombey, France, during World War II, reveals as much about the character of France and Frenchmen as it does about the man who killed in her name. Maurice Brossard, as a young man, was a member of the milice, an active supporter of Marshall Petain and his Vichy government. Believing that the Resistance was anti-France, consisting primarily of Communists intent upon destroying the country's traditional values, specifically the old Catholic values of the conservative church, Brossard was, for many years, afforded protection from prosecution. A resident guest in numerous abbeys and convents, he was financially supported by conservative groups representing both the church and political factions, eventually receiving a pardon by the French President.
Now, accused of crimes against humanity, he is on the run, this time not knowing who it is who hunts him. A multitude of brotherhoods, many of them secret, are revealed in all their nefarious dealings as they seek to restore the glorious heritage they believe to be at the very heart of French civilization. Conservative priests, supporters of Pope Pius XII's position during the war, schismatic groups, political organizations opposed to the chauvinism of DeGaulle, police who have crimes of their own to hide, and politicians whose own pasts are far from innocent all have an interest in Brossard`s life--or death. Additionally, Jewish groups, who feel that justice has not been done, seek retribution.
The suspense here is palpable as various groups seek Brossard for their own ends, and the story is full of action, betrayal, and additional murders. What gives this novel depth is that each group fully justifies their positions on ethical, moral, and philosophical grounds. Moore presents a complex story of the complex French character in ways which are unique, and he does so within a framework of a fast-paced, intellectually challenging pursuit. Jewish readers, in particular, will find the language and attitudes reflected here to be especially offensive--and as horrifying as Moore obviously intends them to be. Mary Whipple
Rating:
Summary: Can crimes against humanity be forgiven?
Review: Brian Moore has succeeded in writing a story regarding war crimes in France. The whole story is centered around the death of fourteen Jews at Dombey and their executioner named Brossard. This fugutive from justice has been protected at the highest levels of government and by the Catholic Church. All is done in the guise of some sort of false ideals of French nationalism. The story is an intriging one. There are the Chevaliers, Catholic clergy and monastic orders all protecting Brossard. In the end, it is surprising to see who actually brings this man to justice, unfortunately all for the wrong reasons, because you see Brossard's death masks the crimes of others. This book is a great one to read and I would recommend it to anyone
Rating: 
Summary: Good God. Longest 250-page Book in History
Review: How this managed to garner 21 reviews (at time of this writing) is beyond me; I can't believe 21 people actually finished the book.I picked this up at the library last week and it has been used exclusively as a sleep aid ever since. Along with "The Statement," I picked up one of Dennis Lehane's pre-"Mystic River" novels. I should have just stuck with Lehane and read his book twice. "The Statement" is slow. Ploddingly slow. "Pre-schooler reading aloud" slow. What's incredible is that the book (hardcover) is only 250 pages and uses the largest "regular" print I've ever seen. Moore clearly had to work to cross the 200-page mark, and it shows. I wonder if he was bored writing this, because that shows, too. The story is confusing, fails to build appropriately, and is overall flat-out dull. Moore spends far too much time introducing new, uninteresting (and irrelevant) characters than developing what really could be an exhilarating topic. To add to a reader's misery, the writing is plain horrid. I am a working screenwriter and have much respect for novelists -- but huge swaths of this book make me cringe: wholly unrealistic dialogue; random and uncomfortable cuts between the past and present-day; speeches by characters that begin "Everyone knows..." and then proceed to catch you up on major plot points that couldn't be successfully weaved into the story; the unexplainable disregard for tense and point-of-view (the book hops randomly between third- and first-person -- which theoretically could be used for dramatic effect, but here is simply bad, bad, bad). The hunting down of war criminals is a concept ripe for a compelling thriller treatment. "The Statement" is simply ripe and, quite frankly, stinks.
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Summary: Good God. Longest 250-page Book in History
Review: It can be said that Brian Moore's "The Statement" is pure nitroglycerine. Explosive as it is, this novel is a mix of revengeful Jews and Catholic priests who protected a nazi officer. All that written in razor sharp prose could turned out in a big mess, but in these talented writer's hands is an unpudownable thriller with some philosophical and ethical issues. One seminal sentence is stated near the end of the novel but it defines all the story is about. "Murder is much more of a selling item than old wartime tales". Pierre Brossard is a man on the run for almost fifty years. What he lives cannot be called a life any longer, but a big wartime lie. He was a nazi officer, accused of killing fourteen Jews. Since the end of the War he has found help and been hidden by Catholic priests. He's got away with for all this time. However, now, he's been chased. A group of Jews are looking for revenge and contract an assassin to kill Brossard. At the same time, the French government and military are trying to find Brossard before, not to protect him, but to give him the trial and punishment he deserves. Using three different sequence of narrative --Brossard, the assassin and the military-- Moore's novel is developed in a crescendo until its end. This may not be a big surprise, but they way the writer develops the story until it is reached is a big bravura. Above all, "The Statement" is the portray of the personification of the evil. While Brossard may look like a nice old gentleman, he has no second thoughts when it comes to killing to protect his past and life and lie. Moore has created such a convincing character that the readers have no ethical issues when thinking of Brossard --he was evil, and deserves to be punished, but, it is up to each reader to decide which punishment the ex-officer deserves. The cast of supporting characters may seem a little flat, but that's the way they are required for this novel. Would we follow their lives `outside' the main plot, this would disturb the sequence of the story. There is no much interest in who they are outside Brossard's story. I liked this thriller a lot. I think it is well written and tackles in a respective way with serious issues that many writers will never feel comfortable enough to write about. The `omission' of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust is a subject that has started being explored with the much deserves seriousness by the literature and cinema only in the recent years. For further information, check Costa-Gavra's "Amen". The subject is real and serious, and when one comes to think of that it really may have happened "The Statement" reaches another level, and almost becomes a horror book. Something for our times.
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Summary: Hitler's other willing executioners
Review: Moore's novel literally starts with a bang as Pierre Brossard, a 70 year old Catholic Frenchman, outguns an assassin who has been sent to kill him. On the assassin's body he finds a statement from the "Committee for Justice for the Jewish Victims of Dombey", claiming responsibility for the execution of Brossard. It turns out that Brossard has been a fugitive for over forty years, having participated in the murder of 14 Jews in 1944. During that time he has been protected by sympathetic members of the Catholic Church, provided with funds, hiding places, transportation and false papers. At one point, they even secured a presidential pardon for him, but then he was charged with a "crime against humanity", against which the pardon offers no dispensation. But now times have changed and many of those in the Church and in government who protected Brossard have passed on and others simply want him out of the way, lest his prosecution serve as a model for subsequent trials. Moreover, the succeeding generation of officials does not bear any sympathy towards him, so they too are on his trail. What follows is a thrilling chase, as Brossard is pursued by Church, State and the shadowy committee and by "friend" and foe alike. Beyond the basic thriller premise, Moore also offers an examination of the often ignored war guilt of France. Initially it seems possible to feel some sympathy for Brossard and the other aging collaborators, to the extent that they were motivated by anti-Communism and anti-modernism. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that, at heart, they were driven as much by genuine hatred of Jews as by any other less repulsive motives. Moore based Brossard on an actual person, Paul Touvier, and the story's essentials, from the assistance of the Church to the presidential pardon, are all historical, though Touvier was captured in 1989 and died in prison. These, of course, are facts that stand in stark contrast to the myth that DeGaulle consciously chose to cultivate instead, of the French people as proud heroes of the Resistance, standing firm against the Nazi oppressor. In fact, just as Jonah Goldhagen's great book Hitler's Willing Executioner's (see review) has forced us to rethink the question of how limited was German responsibility for the Holocaust, it is long past time to reconsider whether Vichy France was truly an aberration or whether it was in some sense a manifestation of French popular opinion. This is especially important in light of the concurrent rise in present day France of both the Muslim population and the extremist Le Pen Party. As France, a nation obsessed by the concepts of Frenchness and French blood, approaches the moment where the classic Gallic Catholic French will be outnumbered by immigrant Muslims, it is necessary to either anticipate the possibility that this will bring genocidal violence or else to, once again, close our eyes and feign surprise when presented with a fait accompli. Brian Moore brilliantly combines a page turning thriller with a thought provoking look at some of these issues. The result is an outstanding novel which, like much of Moore's work, defies the limitations of genre to probe vital moral issues. GRADE: A
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Summary: Brian Moore is Graham Greene's favorite living novelist.
Review: Pierre Brossard was a low-level functionary in Vichy France.He's been on the run for more than 40 years and has twicebeen condemned to death in absentia. His protectors can be found within the police department and the Catholic Church. But now there are assassins on his trail and the word has gone out: no more sanctuary for M. Pierre.
> Though fiction, this book offers the reader a chance to understand something of what if was like to be in France during the Nazi occupation. Did you get along by going along with the puppet government of Marshall Petain? Or did you risk your life in the Resistance Movement? Pierre Brossard is living with the choice he made, but if the dark forces against him -- and who, exactly, are they? -- catch up with him, he will be living no longer.
Rating: 
Summary: OK thriller which ponders quite a few philosophical issues
Review: The fascination one may have with say The Day Of The Jackal may not extend to The Statement. Why is this? At bottom I think it is to do with characterisation. Although The Statement is much richer in its consideration of philosophical questions, moral dilemmas, and the nature of justice, and although it is a competent thriller with some suspense, the characterisation is not especially rich which means as a consequence we, as readers, don't really have the engagement we might otherwise have. As a Belfast born Irishman, politics and religion would seem natural areas of interest for the author as they have proved to be over a writing career spanning fifty years. And they remain fascinating. On the other hand they are not enough to sustain the craftsmanship of this novel. Frankly, I found The Statement a bit of a disappointment.
Rating: 
Summary: Thoughtful thriller
Review: The protagonist of this novel is the bad guy. And the question that Moore asks (and answers at the very end): is it possible for him to find salvation? What I like about this book is that it explores the boundaries between human wickedness and repentance in the personality of Brossard, the French Nazi sympathizer responsible for the deaths of some Jews during the Second World War. Although some Catholics help Brossard, their motivations for doing so are well-explained. This book is generally but subtly sympathetic to Catholicism overall. Please note that this book does contain some graphic scenes and profanity.
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Summary: ready for SUSPENSE ? here it is !
Review: The setting is southern France, 1989. Pierre Brossard is a man on the run for his life. For over 40 years he has been in hiding, counting on the complicity of the Catholic Church to perpetuate his anonymity. During WWII, Brossard was a member of the "milice" and as part of his duties at the time he personally shot 14 Jews in a clandestine pogrom and subsequently co-operated in the sending of many Jews from France to extermination camps. Through his many connections, Brossard managed at one point to obtain an official political pardon for his war-crimes, but now (in 1989) the charge of "crimes against humanity" has been added... with the result that even some of his strongest supporters have turned against him. There is a renewed interest in his case; he's running out of places to hide... and he has more pursuers than ever before. Moore has written a great meditation on the historical processes and conditions that make war crimes or crimes against humanity so difficult to pursue. Brossard is demonstrative of the expertise with which such "criminals" are able to exploit various forces of compromise, immunity, asylum and refuge. Many questions are subtly raised by this book. The Church here affords a sort of refuge to the retributive justice that the outside world demands (concerning Brossard's obvious past crimes/sins)... but what of Brossard's inner torment? Even if the Church offers (grants) Divine pardon... does the pardon of man/society necessarily follow? Should it? (I hope not). What do we make of priestly absolution when it proves ineffective as conscience-cleanser? Is this question being answered when, with his final breath, Brossard tries to be penitent and sense God's pardon, and all he is afforded is a final look (in his mind's eye) at the people that he has killed? It is a story told by a genius writer, Moore didn't even know how to disappoint a reader. The short quick chapters make you quickly forget whatever else you had to do today... you won't stop flipping the pages till your done. He changes the "I" of his narrator constantly, and never loses the reader for a moment. I've read almost all of his many books and consider this among his very best. This is a book that had significant meaning for the author (a sort of purging of his own shame at his father's conservative Catholoic belief and initial support of totalitarianism during WWII). Moore commented concerning "The Statement" that: "I never thought that novels changed the world. I still don't believe that. But I just thought that this was a story which really should come out." It should.
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Summary: Beautifully crafted mediatation on justice, forgiveness, and
Review: This was my first Brian Moore novel; it will certainly not be my last! A story which begs to be read through in one sitting, The Statement holds the reader's breathless attention until the final paragraph. An extremely thoughtful exploration of the realities of life in Vichy France- a hidden history for many of us, into which this was a fascinating glimpse. The character of the protagonist is finely drawn and multi-dimensional. The 'supporting cast' provide a variety of perspectives which enhance this portrait and bring M. Brossard to vivid life. Above all, this novel is a fascinating meditation on the ultimate meaning of terms like 'justice,' and 'forgiveness, and their application in a very real- and sorrowfully sinful- world.
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