WHO TO CALL: Community Editor Andrew McCredie Entertainment Editor Layne Christensen « t ’ 985-2131 (147) 985-2131 (118) MGS ne antic ba SINCE THE death of Graham Greene, John Le Carre has made ever more ponderous attempts to annex “Greeneland”, tat country of the mind where morality and circumstance conspire to challenge the individual soul, |” By John Moore Contributing Writer Le Carre's coup has failed sim- ply because he can imitate Greene's style, but not his Catholicism. In a morally relativist world where good and evil have become ‘lower case nouns, the Catholic Church still asserts the exis- tence of Good and Evil in capital letters. Greene’s characters _.were always more complex because of the dramatic tension created by human frailty revealed in the context of absolute > values. Greene’s true heir has emerged in the person of Brian Moore (no relation), Irish-Canadian author of J Am Mary ~ Dunne, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, Cold Heaven, Black Robe, ' . @te. His latest, The Statement, (Knopf Canada. $29.95), is a -.. book to gladden the heart of Green’s morning fans; as taught- =" ly written and fraught with moral ambiguities as The - Confidential Agent. Pierre Brossard, former chief of the French collaborationist Milice who helped the Germans round up and execute Jews during WWI, has been on the run for 44 years, aided by ~ rightist anti-semitic rebels within the church, but vengeful Israeli agents are hot on his trail. Or are they really working for former collaborators, now senior French officials, to whom ‘Brossard could prove a major embarrassment? ; “© In this tale of a sordid small-time war criminal coming to the end of his tether, Moore has recaptured the authentic Greene mode in which high moral drama is played out in the seediest of human settings. ‘ In Hell, his first unpublished novel, (now published by Random House $26.95), about a dysfunctional young man who embarks on an obsessive qliest to discover the truth about his grandfather who left Canada to visit “the old country” (Poland) just in time to be swal- Sowed by the “night and fog" of the Nazi regime and WWII. Loosely based on the cases of several small-time collaborators and war-criminals discovered in Canada in recent years, Stand in Hell is strongest in its portrayal of the ‘criminal’. Is he just a man who happened to be “in the wrong place at the wrong time", knew nothing about politics and cared less, and did whatever was expedient to survive? Is that enough to make a man a monster, under the circumstances? Raising those questions redeems Stand In Hell because Bolen’s protagonist, Robin Wallenco, is a bit of a waste of space otherwise and Bolen wal- lows in such extensive descriptions of his dissipa- tion at the outset that readers may be tempted to shrug him off. Bolen does succeed in evoking the moral ambiguity of the times, when many cast European and western Russian peoples initially regarded the Nazi armies as “liberators” from Soviet domina- tion or intimidation, when anti-semitism was taken for granted and no average person could imagine that any government bureaucracy could organize mass murder along industrial lines. He also explores the deeper and largely review ‘neglected question of what it means to have a war-criminal, a mass murderer, as a near relative —- a problem which certainly confronts many people living now who took no part in the horrors of the last world conflict. A friend of mine once sailed with a Dutch captain who STORIES ven EAE NEWS photo Mike Wakefiaid NORTH VANCOUVER District Library Children’s Coordinator Allison Haupt reads a book on acioption that was purchased for the Lynn Valley branch by way of a cash donation from the Adoptive Parents of B.C. November is: Adoption Awareness Month. : disparate styles; both remind us that atrocities are not mea- - sured in the number of victims, that killing three million instead of six million people does not make the perpetrators “half as bad” or “half as guilty”. Ic is the participation in a system that permits human beings to be exterminated systematically, industrially, as if _ they were cockroaches, that degrades and dehumanizes not i only the victims but the killers and the whole of the supposed- ly human race. . . - fled the German invasion of Holland, served in British mer- chant marine convoys, survived numerous torpedoings and later ran guns to Israel. His brother had joined and fought for the Dutch SS, And you think your family is weird when it gets together at Christmas, One thing Moore and Bolen have in common, despite their » : Second World War criminals are literally a dying breed and fiction about them will inevitably follow suite and undergo a genre shift from “contemporary” to “historical”, "Yet Vancouver writer Dennis Bolen — whose novel Stupid Crimes was published by his own Anvil Press then picked up by Random House — dug into his drawer to resurrect Stand cArTics’.. 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