At what price justice?

IN the Western spiritual tradition, contemplation sometimes confers certain gifts, one of which is discernment.

Ward Just has spent the last 36 years contemplating America’s public square and the private lives of those who conduct the country’s business there, and the discernment gleaned from that long meditation makes his 15th novel, “Forgetfulness,” the first notable work by a major American writer to engage the moral and emotional complexities of the post-9/11 world.

On that basis alone Just’s book would merit attention, but it also is a masterfully realized addition to the modern literature of the conflicted shadow world, worthy to be shelved alongside Graham Greene and John le Carre.

The plot is richly layered, evocative and -- as the tradition requires -- simultaneously propulsive and discursive. (There’s probably no American writer now working who pulls that trick off better than Just.) The book’s protagonist is Thomas Railles, a successful American portrait painter, now in late middle age, married to a French woman named Florette, living and working in her native village in the Pyrenees. Thomas is alienated from his American roots and thinks of himself as “a species of ghost,” though he prefers the term “displaced person.”

Other than Florette, his closest friend in the village is an ancient and wealthy English expatriate, St. John Granger, whose death early in the narrative haunts Thomas. As a captain in the British army, Granger survived La Boisselle -- the worst battle on the worst day at the Somme -- then calmly deserted and never looked back. Granger regards three-cushion billiards as a metaphor for life, and Thomas admires the rich self-sufficiency of his exile and his facility at getting rid of unwanted company.

Over the years, Thomas has been a sometimes-agent of U.S. intelligence, working for two old school chums who have risen through the CIA ranks. They, by chance, have come to visit for Sunday lunch and, afterward, Florette leaves them with a fresh bottle of wine and slips out for her usual walk in the hills. She falls, breaks an ankle and -- through horrible mischance -- is happened upon by four radical Islamic terrorists, sneaking into France from nearby Spain. After dithering over what to do with the injured woman, their leader cuts her throat.

The painter’s friends fear her killing may be something more than a random act of violence, perhaps an act of retribution for one of Thomas’ past jobs. He cannot make himself care. Florette’s death severs Thomas’ only bond of loyalty to anything but his work.

Midway through the narrative, two passages, separated by just a couple of pages, illustrate the sure and knowing hand that Just usually brings to such matters. In the first, a bereft Thomas receives a note from one of his old spook pals that easily could stand in for a news analysis on today’s front page:

“Just before Christmas Thomas received a long handwritten letter from Bernhard Sindelar, postmarked Washington. Bernhard had been called back to headquarters for a conference, a general review of current operations with special attention to methods and sources ... a dispirited and dispiriting exercise. Morale was terrible, the fudge factory’s bureaucracy nervously broken down without energy enough for rebellion. Congress was asniff, the Pentagon frightened, and the White House in deep prayer,” the old spy writes.

Thomas rejects Sindelar’s ironic parting advice that he should admit that he is “a rootless cosmopolitan.” He should sell the house in “dreary Aquitaine,” buy a flat in Paris’ Sixth Arrondissement and get out more. Instead, the widower settles more deeply in, wonders a hundred times a day “if he should buy a Christmas tree and a wreath for the front door,” drinks wine and practices three-cushion shots at “drastic angles” on his pool table for hours on end. New Year’s brings a kind of false spring and, finally:

“Each afternoon Thomas drove to a different village and sketched churches inside and out. Many of the churches dated from the Middle Ages. He had an idea he could discover the medieval rhythm of life from the altars and choirs -- bare ruined choirs, according to the Bard -- and the worn wood of the pews, heavy stones underfoot. The fathers had ruled things to suit themselves, in those days and later, and now the churches were relics, sparsely attended, mostly by old people. The priests were old. There was great beauty in the architecture, in the silence and the overhead space -- a beauty he concluded of a sentimental kind, the beauty of a very old woman praying fiercely.”

Thomas turns briefly to alcohol for consolation and, in the midst of one drunken reverie, Sindelar telephones to say that French intelligence has apprehended four Muslim men who they believe are Florette’s killers. “He supposed they were members of some despised minority, Basques or Chechens or Tamils or any one of the numerous Muslim tribes and brotherhoods. They would have souls full of grievance, over God or land or Western music or imperialism or women’s provocative clothing.”

Thomas is invited to witness their interrogation, which involves torture. The questioning is conducted by a master inquisitor, a French agent named Antoine. After the first morning’s session, the CIA operative Sindelar asks Thomas what he thought of the process, which they watched from behind a two-way mirror.

“ ‘I didn’t like it,’ Thomas said.

“ ‘Of course not,’ Bernhard said. ‘You’re not trained. You have no experience in these matters. The technique is confusing at first, what’s being done and why. The pauses and the silences, the pacing, the entrances and exits. The protocol. Did you know that Chaplin said the essence of performance was the entrance and the exit? That’s what he said. And he ought to know. It’s a specialized skill and you should consider yourself lucky that you haven’t had to learn it.... ‘

“Bernhard leaned close to him and whispered, ‘Antoine’s worked with the Comedie Francaise. A valued colleague, I’m told. Gifted at farce. He enjoys playing Le Misanthrope.... ‘

“ ‘Is that the one where they use the bastinados?’ ”

What Thomas ultimately makes of the interrogation and its aftermath is the novel’s dramatic and moral fulcrum: And it’s too critical to the narrative to be given away. Suffice to say, the painter/spy experiences several sorts of homecoming.

Before he took up writing fiction, Just was one of America’s most distinguished foreign correspondents. Covering the Vietnam War for the Washington Post, he acquired a reputation for great personal bravery and was well known for his willingness to make audacious reporting trips into the most distant and hazardous fighting.

In June of 1966, while accompanying a forward reconnaissance patrol of the 101st Airborne in the highlands near Dak To, he was severely wounded but refused evacuation until all similarly injured enlisted men were helicoptered to safety. Like many of the correspondents who witnessed the fighting in Southeast Asia close up, Just came away with the belief that what was then called “unconventional warfare” -- today, the Pentagon calls it “asymmetrical” -- was essentially a physical and psychological struggle of attrition in which tactics were far more important than strategy. It was not, in other words, a war in which ends could be made to justify means.

In one of their conversations in “Forgetfulness,” Antoine mildly accuses the grieving Thomas of lacking both a “civic conscience” and the thing that makes it possible -- anger. “Anger,” he said. “The common denominator of all ideology. A belief in the righteousness of your cause and the squalor of all other causes. It comes easily to me because I am fundamentally a policeman.”

In the days since 9/11, W.H. Auden’s great poem, “September 1, 1939,” has been quoted repeatedly, particularly that famous sequence: “Hunger allows no choice / To the citizen or the police; / We must love one another or die.” Ward Just’s somberly thought-provoking new novel suggests that this moment in history demands that each of us proceed in solidarity with our consciences -- knowing full well that we may die, no matter who or what we love.

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tim.rutten@latimes.com