Milan Kundera crops up a few times, and his light-footed, epigrammatic style is clearly a strong influence. Madame Bovary is found wanting Salammbô is praised. Techniques of various kinds are held up for summary judgment ("faithful to my long-held disgust for realistic novels, I say to myself: Yuk"). Quick nods and jabs are delivered at the many books and movies that have inspired or threatened Binet along the way. Was Heydrich's Mercedes black or green? Which side of the train did the exiled head of Czechoslovak secret services sit on during his clandestine trip through Nazi Germany to set up the resistance networks in Prague?Įlsewhere the intrusions seem to be more about assembling an on-the-hoof literary manifesto. At their crudest they seem purely self-regarding: there to present him as an appealing type of slacker-scholar, glued to the History Channel, addicted to video-games, given to amiably flip outbursts of opinion, while also winningly obsessive over questions of micro-historical accuracy, and obsessed with his own obsessiveness.
The shifting nature of Binet's self-insertions, not to mention the very poised assurance of his writing, makes it a harder question to answer than you might expect. So the question lingers: is the corpse-strewn story of Heydrich's ascent to head of the Gestapo and "Protector" of annexed Czechoslovakia (where he earned his nickname, "the Butcher of Prague") in any significant way enriched by its author's playful anxieties about his girlfriend, musings on his dreams, or even by his more obviously pertinent struggles over whether to invent the dialogue or imagine the inner feelings of his real-life characters? (He was Himmler's right-hand man, and the title refers to a piece of ponderous Nazi waggishness: Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich – Himmler's brain is called Heydrich). But Heydrich's icily demonic character necessarily dominates the book, and his pivotal roles in the key atrocities of the era, from Kristallnacht to the final solution itself, take up a substantial part of the narrative. It's about his assassination, specifically, and the undersung Czech resistance heroes who carried it out an angle that licenses a certain jauntiness in the tone.
Whether you find it something more than that will depend on how you feel about the application of breezy charm and amusingly anguished authorial self-reflexiveness to a book about the Nazi security chief Reinhard Heydrich, who must be one of the most unfunny figures in recorded history.
A breezily charming novel, with a thrilling story that also happens to be true, by a gifted young author amusingly anguished over the question of how to tell it … In principle there's nothing not to like about Laurent Binet's acclaimed debut, and HHhH is certainly a thoroughly captivating performance.
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