IN THE prologue, Carmen Callil tells how she came to write this extraordinary book. A young Australian in her 20s, far from home in Europe, and unable to escape the memories of a purgatorial childhood, she took an overdose. A friend introduced her to the ideal psychiatrist, a woman only eight years older than her patient and apparently half Australian. This was Anne Darquier. And for the next seven years she slowly reeled Callil back into life and health.

Then in 1970 Anne Darquier herself died of an overdose. She was buried as Anne Darquier de Pellepoix. A year later, watching Marcel Ophuls's film The Sorrow And The Pity: The Story Of A French Town In The Occupation, Callil saw that unusual name again in the subtitles. Louis Darquier de Pellepoix was a Vichy official. And not just any Vichy official . . . he was the Commissioner of Jewish Affairs. The man directly responsible for sending tens of thousands of French and refugee Jews to German gas chambers.

It didn't take long to establish that he was Anne's father. Anne's mother was a Myrtle Jones from Tasmania. The names were there but who were these people? What connection did they have to the woman who had rescued Callil's life?

They both came from respectable families, but when they met they had long left conventional life behind them.

At first their story reads like one of those slightly squalid accounts of vagabond life in the 1920s and '30s when so many were living hand to mouth. He was a swindler, a conman, but not an intelligent one. Myrtle, even at this stage probably an alcoholic, wrote letters home to her family about her exotic high-class European life, all the while living in flea-pit hotels. Endlessly in debt, living off handouts he managed to cajole from his family, they came to London where Louis intended to launch his career as a novelist, their latest fantasy.

He produced no book, but Myrtle did produce a baby, the inconvenient Anne.

She was only a few months old when they hired a nanny, Elsie Lightfoot, agreed terms with her and promptly decamped back to France. Anne didn't see her parents again until her teenage years.

If one didn't know the outcome, the posturing and petty infighting within the far right in France during the '30s would be almost comical. Callil's treatment of her meticulously researched material in the central section of the book, dealing with France under occupation, is entirely engrossing. Through the story of Louis Darquier we get a rare and very disturbing insight into one of the most unpleasant and yet fascinating periods in modern history. And this isn't because Louis Darquier . . . the de Pellepoix was pure pretentious invention . . . was a complex Machiavellian character whose evil exploits oozed a kind of dark glamour.

Far from it. Darquier from the outset was a vulgar chancer, a shoddy opportunist constantly in debt, a loud, arrogant bore whose anti-Semitic rants probably tried the patience of even the most committed fascist. What's fascinating is how a man like that, a barfly, a bully, and pathologically idle, even managed to reach the 'elevated' position he did.

The answer is probably as crude as the man. The Jews were not only a problem to be solved by the Final Solution, they also presented a huge economic opportunity. During the occupation of France the Vichy government and the German authorities squabbled over who should take the lion's share of wealth stripped from the Jewish community.

Darquier was always happy to help the Germans, as long as he got his little percentage of the action, hence his usefulness.

All the while Anne was growing up in England in rural poverty. Elsie Lightfoot had the greatest difficulty getting the child's allowance from her parents. Anne had little interest in her mother and centred all her dreams on her father. She imagined him a gallant Free French officer. Knowing there were doctors in his family she determined on that as her career. And despite enormous obstacles, once the war was over, she got to Oxford to study medicine. What must she have felt when she finally met her father, living in Spain under an assumed name, an escaped war criminal? He was the quintessence of all she despised.

Her mother she knew to be a drunk, and probably a drug addict, but meeting him was the bitterest disillusionment, one she never recovered from. In her short brilliant career as a psychiatrist she helped many people recover from the wounds of their past but in her own case the wounded healer could not help herself.

Without doubt the best book I've read this year; informative, intelligently written, and heart-breaking.