Title: I Am Alive and You Are Dead

Author: Kate Camp

In: Sport 29: Spring 2002

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, October 2002

Part of: Sport

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Sport 29: Spring 2002

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On January 9, 1993, Jean-Claude Romand killed his two young children, his wife and his parents then torched the family home in Prevessin, near the Swiss border of France. He survived the blaze, stood trial and was convicted of murder. What made his crime the focus of national—and international—attention was that in its aftermath Romand's life was revealed as a fiction. The man known to his family, friends and neighbours as a doctor at the World Health Organisation, working on ground-breaking research, had in fact never graduated from medical school, never held down a job, never travelled across the Swiss border to work. The person they thought they knew—and had known for decades—simply did not exist.

Disturbed and intrigued by the case, French novelist and biographer Emmanuel Carrere contacted Romand and met with him in prison.1 The Adversary is his account of Romand's life, a haunting investigation into not so much a heart of darkness as a heart of absence. The void at the core of Jean-Claude Romand gives questions about the construction of identity—so beloved of French intellectuals—a frightening, visceral immediacy. It also brings into focus those times in our own lives when, by living a lie, we have somehow ceased to live at all.

The details of how Romand managed the deception are fascinating, but Carrere's book is not merely or primarily a journalistic investigation page 209 of true crime. It is instead an exquisite and deeply unsettling portrait of a man who defies all expectations of the word. The Romand who emerges seems more like a figment of science fiction or a philosophical conundrum than a living, breathing human being. Far beyond the definitions of psychopath, sociopath or compulsive liar, he appears on these pages as a kind of psychological and moral invisible man.

I have read countless books about men who kill their families. Usually the sense one gets is of a world thrown into chaos by a sudden, aberrant act. No matter how disturbed and violent the family and environment, no matter how well-illuminated the recesses of the killer's mind, the murder almost always appears as an incomprehensible affront to reality, an act of senseless, even nonsensical, violence.

In Romand's case, murder makes sense. Having spent his whole life engaged in an elaborate cover-up, it is only once a crime has been committed that his story can be understood. Ah ha! one thinks. Now I know what he was hiding.

Like the moral and temporal reversals of Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, where a Nazi war criminal's life is reversed so literally that his shits jump out of the toilet and back into his arse, Romand's life story is perfectly logical if watched in rewind. There can be few criminal cases that so strongly demand a philosophical reading, and no people on earth more disposed to deliver such a reading than the French.