When the novel meets the Nazi

Laurent Binet reckons novels can’t explain Nazis, so in writing ‘HHhH’ he tried to avoid fictionalising one of the second World War’s most spectacular stories, and made a cracking book in the process

LAURENT BINET has just woken up. He opens the apartment door with a sheepish grin and throws himself down on the couch in his tracksuit, feet propped on the edge of a coffee table laden down with books.

You wouldn’t begrudge Binet his lie-in. For months his clock has been set to the relentless tempo of the French presidential election campaign – the subject of his next book. Shadowing François Hollande, whom he correctly judged would be the winner, he has spent the past six months criss-crossing the country by day and returning to his desk each evening to put down his thoughts while they’re still fresh. “It found it really exciting, but the book is due out in September, so it’s pretty intense,” he says.

Binet is also spending a lot of time these days talking about the book that made his name. HHhH, his account of the operation to kill the head of the security agencies of Nazi Germany, Reinhard Heydrich, in 1942, was rapturously received on its publication in France two years ago. It won Binet the Goncourt first novel award and sold so well that he gave up his job as a teacher to write full-time. The book has been translated into about 20 languages, and its release in an elegant English translation by Sam Taylor this month has been accompanied by generous praise from Mario Vargas Llosa and Bret Easton Ellis, among others. “I dreamed of a Goncourt, and that it would do well in France, but I hadn’t thought that it could be translated and sold abroad. That surprised me,” says the 39-year-old.

HHhH is built around the remarkable true story of two parachutists sent on a daring mission by the Czech government-in-exile in London to assassinate Heydrich, the most senior Nazi in occupied Prague. This is the novel’s heart; a gripping account of how two ordinary men plotted to take down one of the most fearsome Nazi leaders – known variously as “the hangman of Prague”, “the blond beast” or, within the SS, as HHhH (Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich in German, or “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”). It was “one of the greatest acts of resistance in human history”, Binet writes, and he skillfully retraces the plot from its unlikely beginning to its dramatic dénouement.

And yet Operation Anthropoid, as the mission to kill Heydrich was code-named, is only part of Binet’s formally inventive work. Running in tandem with the historical narrative is a running commentary of the author’s own struggle with his material (Binet and the narrator are one and the same, he tells me, putting to rest a niggling doubt). We learn how he came across the story and agonised over the project for 10 years. How much can he truly know about the sequence of events, the author asks himself. Is he over- interpreting, or being unfaithful to the facts?

As it unfolds, HHhH becomes a reflection on the relationship between fiction and history, a two-way exchange between the author and his sources. “I just hope that, however bright and blinding the veneer of fiction that covers this fabulous story,” he writes, “you will still be able to see through it to the historical reality that lies behind.”

Binet first heard of Operation Anthropoid from his father, but it was during a period of military service in Slovakia that his obsession with the story began to take hold. “I asked around for details, and the more I learned about it the more I realised it was an extraordinary story – and one that wasn’t very well known in France,” he recalls, rolling a cigarette on his coffee-table.

The writer immediately came up against an obstacle. Despite having operated largely in the shadows, as head of the Nazi secret service, Heydrich was a major figure in the Third Reich – it was he who organised the Kristallnacht programme in November 1938 and led the Wannsee Conference that put in motion the “Final Solution”. That meant information about Heydrich was relatively plentiful.

Much less was known about Jan Kubic and Jozef Gabcik, the two men sent to Prague to kill him. The temptation was to invent lives for his two principals, but that left Binet uneasy. He wanted to level with the reader, and to do that he decided to write himself – his trips to Prague, his writing process, his anguished conversations with his girlfriend, all of it – on to the page. “That allowed me to underline the fact that this story was true and, being a true story, it was complicated to tell,” he explains.

“Situating myself as the author was also a way of stressing subjectivity. In any book, the subjective view of the author is always there. Normally it’s concealed, but I was interested in showing it in order to allow the reader to make up his own mind. I was signalling to him that what I was saying was not truth itself, it was just my point of view as a 21st-century reader, a history teacher, the son of a communist, who could be wrong, who could at times be acting in bad faith, and so on.”

On the wall of Binet’s living room is an old election poster of his father, a one-time communist councillor in a Paris suburb. There’s one of Spiderman too. The room is coming down with books: Barthes, Foucault, history tomes, some contemporary French fiction. He is currently reading, and enjoying, Philip Kerr’s Prague Fatale. But is HHhH not a repudiation of historical fiction? Not quite, he replies.

“When you write detective fiction, you want to tell the reader a good story. That’s no problem. What bothers me is when authors claim to explain things with a novel.”

As Binet was writing HHhH, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones – a novel centered on a fictional SS officer during Hitler’s doomed eastern campaign – was published. The book became a sensation, won Littell the Goncourt Prize and left Binet, toiling away at his desk with similar subject matter, disturbed. Littell’s book crystallised his own position on the blurring of lines between historical fact and fiction, he says.

“What I reproach in The Kindly Ones is not really Jonathan Littell’s fault. The reception of the book in France was completely ecstatic. A lot of critics said: ‘Read The Kindly Ones. It’s better than any history book in understanding Nazism.’ That’s just false. It’s false.

“I enjoyed reading it, but the principal character in The Kindly Ones absolutely does not help us understand what a Nazi was. He has no connection to any Nazi who ever existed. He’s unbelievable.”

Binet’s novel is an implicit critique of the novelist’s assumption that historical facts are malleable, that they can be shaped for his own ends. But it also develops into a critique of bad history-writing. “Consciously, I wanted to formulate a reproach of classic novelists, but it’s true that unconsciously it is, in effect, a reproach of some historians – not all, of course – who present themselves as neutral and objective while making themselves disappear behind the book.”

With its double-narrative and its authorial playfulness, HHhH reads in places like a stylistic homage to WG Sebald or Italo Calvino. French reviewers drew parallels with Truman Capote’s “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. But the closest model, Binet realised after his book was published, was Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, in which the author alternates between two timelines – a concentration camp in the 1940s and his conversations with his father, a Holocaust survivor, in the present.

And yet HHhH doesn’t entirely repudiate fiction. Every so often, the book departs from the sources and gives in to the temptation to fill out, colour in, or add a little texture – even if the author alerts the reader to his diversions. Binet owes as much to the novelist’s conventions as the historian’s. “I use all the tools of the novel – suspense, style, flashbacks, the composition, and so on – except one, which is recourse to fiction. It’s history that goes to the doorstep of the novel,” he says with a laugh.

That insistence on realism leads Binet down some narrow alley-ways. He devotes a long passage to a discussion on whether the car in which Heydrich was travelling on the morning of the planned assassination was black or dark green (spoiler alert: he can’t be sure).

“It’s a detail, but why do I go into that?” he says, taking a literature teacher’s pleasure in teasing it out. “It’s not so that the reader will know if the car is green or black. It’s a form of self-mockery. It’s so that the reader is aware of my neuroses. With a question like that, the reader learns that I’m half-mad, but that I’m aware of it.”

HHhH by Laurent Binet, translated by Sam Taylor, is published by Harvill Secker