HHhH [Hardcover]

I must admit this book sent me scurrying to see what the definition of a novel is. It is described on the cover as a novel and inside the author speaks of it as a novel and yet this is the true story of the wartime assassination attempt made on the life of Reinhard Heyrick, "the hangman of Prague", by two Czech resistance fighters sent from London. Its actually much more than that telling as it does of the whole rise of Hitler's Germany but it has a focus on Prague where Heydrich reigned supreme. And it is all true. The events described did happen and all of the characters did exist. There are no made up events, no invented characters, no fictional subplots. The author does make up dialogue to fit scenes for which there are no historical record, but he always makes it clear that in these instances he is writing history as it might have happened, as he would like to think that it happened.

So what makes it a novel ? Laurent Binet adopts the post-modern technique of placing himself inside his story to tell us how it developed, the people he met, the mistakes he made, the books he read and gives us his thoughts and feelings as he "lives" the story. At times he tells events with himself placed in the "now" and sometimes he places himself in Prague at the time events were unfolding. Also the structure does not flow in the linear fashion that a purely historical account might. It moves back and forth from events sometimes major sometimes minor, sometimes just a random quote from a wartime diary, sometimes a few paragraphs to tell how the author came across a related book and what he thought of it. The author is trying to make us experience what it was like to be there and he doesn't have any qualms as to how he goes about it.

And then there is the writing. Binet writes in a powerful and yet highly personal way. One minute he is writing a stirring or chilling account of events in Nazi Germany and the next he is slagging off some writer that he has come across. We are never in doubt that the author is passionately and personally involved with this story nor that there is a huge amount of research behind it.

And I think it is the coming together of all of the above that makes it a novel. When the structure and style and the writing combine to create something that is more artistic than any purely historical account would ever be, we have a novel. I think.

More importantly, it is brilliant. I often try to read historical accounts and just get bogged down in the dryness and wordiness of it all. Here Binet has written about something that I didn't even know that I wanted to know about and yet I was enthralled for every page of it. It would be easy to say it reads like a thriller and is completely unputdownable. Yes, but there is also a uniqueness that you will to have read the book to understand

Try it. This is a great novel !

I spent my Honeymoon in Prague one crisp and clear December, and among the happy memories, I recall coming across the Saints Cyril and Methodius` Cathedral in the middle of the city. What caught my eye wasn't the architecture, but the figure of a World War II `British' paratrooper, depicted by a statue outside the cathedral, surrounded like a saint's statue by lights, candles and flowers, next to a window pulverised by ancient bullet holes.

Like the author of this utterly compelling and innovative novel, I began to read about Operation Anthropoid, the story behind this book. In a popular media haunted by glamorous and glamorised accounts of special operations, the story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich still speaks of the creeping terror of resistance operations, and the un-faded horror of the revenge killings executed by an utterly ruthless regime.

The malign genius of the story remains Heydrich, the quintessential Nazi, like yet unlike so many of his superiors and peers. He was not merely a sickeningly twisted inadequate, but had an icy glamour, being a compelling, intelligent figure as well as an amoral force. The story of his assassination and its motivation is dominated by the fear that such an able and lucid man would seize control of Germany's armed forces if anything happened to Hitler. Allied governments feared the power of the Third Reich would be dominated by someone who actually knew what they were doing. A supreme commander who might listen to his generals was too horrific to contemplate. This, combined with the pressures, compromises and anxieties of the Czech government in exile in London, led to the parachute drop of two soldiers, one Czech, one Slovak, on a lonely mission to rid Czechoslovakia and Europe of a tyrant.

The image of Heydrich in popular culture is dominated in my mind by the chilling portrayal of Heydrich by Kenneth Branagh in the film Conspiracy, and his appearance as a character in the latest Bernie Gunther novel by Philip Kerr. The claustrophobia of Anthropoid is also captured in the low-key 1970s film Operation Daybreak. I think if you want a dispassionate account of the operation from the military history perspective, you couldn't do better than the newly reissued and best account of the assassination by Callum Macdonald, The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.

This novel is something different, a breath-taking debut from young writer which moves easily between two very distinct genres. It seems imperfect, and compromised on first reading: sometimes mannered and self-conscious. But this is the essence of what the novelist is trying to do, and it makes for a powerful examination of the way a novel tells the story and the effects of novel writing on the author, dramatizing the pressure of doing justice to such a resonant and true story. The nearest British example I can think of in terms of this style was John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman. Fowles was of course, influenced heavily by the French writer, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and obvious that this strand of the French "new novel" has been an influence on the young writer of this ground-breaking work. Binet combines the best elements of the thriller with a knowing self-interrogation of his literary process, and he resolutely refuses to fall between two stools, challenging, stimulating and delighting both audiences. I was particularly drawn to the self-conscious self-criticism of the fascination of the Second World War continues to cast across the generations. Binet is unashamedly a player of computer games, and the cold austerity of the war years seep even into his dreams. His engagement with the conflict and with the malign figure of Heydrich is troubling, yet honest, and created a deep sense of empathy from this reviewer. Readers interested in the anatomy of a fixation on an obscure topic by a writer, might find the short essay "9th and 13th" by Jonathan Coe where he dissects his obsession with the film "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes".

This is a wildly different novel to Hillary Mantel's Wolf Hall, but struck me as similar in its energy and reinvention of the genre. I could go on, but after reading this novel I feel any final words or statement on the Anthropoid story should conclude with the names of the two brave men who met their death in a cold church in a Prague side street: Jozef Gab'ík and Jan Kubis - rest in peace.

1
It is June 2008. You are in Prague. At the table next to you, on the terrace of the Two Brothers café in the Karlovo Namesti, sits Laurent Binet, typing earnestly into his Apple laptop. The late spring heat is oppressive, but the fatigue in Binet's brown eyes comes less from the weather than from the intensity of his effort. You observe as a bead of sweat trickles down Binet's forehead, before dripping from the tip of his nose onto the heavily annotated manuscript on which he appears to be working. Looking closer, you notice the manuscript is titled "HHhH". What can it mean??

2
Binet really does exist. A quick wiki search reveals that he was born 40 years ago in Paris and that "HHhH" is his first novel. I'm pretty sure he wrote at least some of it in Prague, and the picture I saw in the `Paris Match' colour supplement makes me think his eyes are probably brown. Or hazel, maybe. But I need to level with you. The scene in the first section of my review is pure invention. I have no idea whether Binet uses an Apple laptop. Did he ever edit his manuscript in the Two Brothers café? I have absolutely no idea.

3
"Look, don't get me wrong. It's OK, but Umberto Eco was doing this kind of stuff 30 years ago. It's tired, it's stale, it's old hat. Postmodernist narrative structures are so 1980s. Don't take it too hard: the 1942 part of the story is fine, but all that navel gazing about how you did your research? And your relationship with your girlfriend? Come on Laurent, who wants to read that kind of thing?"
This wasn't the reaction Binet had expected from his literary agent. Clearly the manuscript would need another redraft. He sets off crestfallen towards the Two Brothers café.

4
Carol, my wife, has just brought me a copy of `Hello' from July 2012, and there's a photo of Binet on page 32. Isn't it funny how, when you start to write about something, you suddenly find it everywhere? She's convinced Binet's eyes in the photo are in fact green. Green, brown, hazel... This is really starting to bug me now.

5
"HHhH" is a self-reflexive postmodern novel about a 1942 assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich in Czechoslovakia. Parallel to this historical narrative runs the story of how the author, Laurent Binet, researched it, and the dilemmas he faced in trying to construct a novel that was truly faithful to his source material. In it, Binet constantly plays with our expectations as readers. There are no page numbers; there are 257 chapters, ranging in length from 20 pages to a single sentence; Binet blurs the boundary between past and present, and inserts himself into his own historical narrative. More subversively, time and again he uses our appetite for "the story" to show us how easily we can be manipulated by a text - a kind of narrative ju-jitsu that pulls the rug out from the reader's feet by hooking us into a story only to show us that the story is ultimately a fake. This technique in turn asks us broader questions about the interface between fiction and reality: how is possible to write history, let alone historical fiction, that truly conveys how `things really were'? Binet peels back the layers of this conundrum with a calm and neutral honesty, and with a seriousness that belies the playfulness of his narrative structure. Amazingly, there's tension, suspense and excitement not only in Binet's war story (and it's a great story, well told), but also in his more philosophical quest through the thickets of postmodern critical theory. It's a fascinating book, and well worth reading. Unquestionably deserving of five stars.

6
You know, I'm just not happy with section 4. I don't think I'll include it in my final review. I feel bad about giving my wife a false name. And anyway, you can't believe everything you see in `Hello', can you?

7
He is alone on the Champs Elysees, striding purposefully away from his agent's office. He has the winner's cheque for the Prix Goncourt in his pocket and, as the autumn sun glints in his blue eyes, he surrenders himself to a sensation of pure vindication. And, somewhere in Paris, I am there with him.