Laurent Binet: HHhH

This review has taken three or four months to write. I began it I think in September, wrote most of it in an hour or so, then left it alone until today. Today I finished it. So it has been three or four months in the making, those months bookended by an hour or so at either end. A gestation period this long tells you something about me, but it also tells you something about this book, and for that reason I include this as a not entirely irrelevant preamble.

HHhH stands for 'Hmmler's Hirn heist Heydrich', meaning, so they said in the SS, 'Himmler's brain is called Heydrich'. So this is a book about Himmler's brain, Heydrich, which it partly is. Binet wanted to call the book 'Operation Anthropoid', which was the code name given to the plan to assassinate Heydrich in 1942, organised in London by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile together with the British Special Operations Executive, and carried out by two paratroopers, Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik.  'Operation Anthropoid' is a better name for the book, but was dismissed by the publishers for sounding too much like a Robert Ludlum novel. I've never read a Robert Ludlum novel.

HHhH is a part-autobiographical account of the author's efforts to write a historical novel. Binet calls it an infranovel, and in as much as the prefix suggests a rumbling and a reverberation beneath the surface, emanating quietly outwards, it's not a bad name for it at all. That's kind of what lots of the scenes in this book feel like - not quite still, quietly reverberating. Binet's predilection for revisionism, and his seeming B.S Johnsonesque disdain for the contrivances of fiction, are behind these quiet reverberations. He will often correct or agonise over a detail from a previous chapter, whether it be the colour of Heydrich's Mercedes, a passing reference to a Charlie Chaplin film, or a single line of dialogue. One chapter early on is a sort of stream-of-consciousness reflection on four lines of dialogue from the preceding chapter, and becomes more generally a commentary on the problems and the artificialities of reconstructing dialogue in a historical narrative. At times this constant revisionism smacks of self-indulgence, especially towards the end of the story when the authorial interventions are conspicuously contrived to prolong the suspense of the final shoot-out scene. But at other times the interventions serve to expose a scene to a new perspective, or to present the scene in a different tone or colour. In this sense Binet goes some way to achieving what he set out to achieve, namely a sense of realism and authenticity.

Although not perhaps when it comes to Heydrich. The eponymous character remains just that, a character, too grotesque, too much like the caricature nazis of 1980's Hollywood to  ever convince as a living and breathing historical portrait. He is the blonde, blue-eyed paragon of Aryan idealism, and the machiavellian schemer of a Shakespearean tragedy. Heydrich never quite escapes from a technicolour procession of familiar cultural and literary templates: the bullied, humiliated schoolboy as embryonic form for the bitter despot adult, the sleazy "inveterate pussy hound" lieutenant smacking of sexual and moral degeneracy, the meticulous, kafkaesque behind-the-scenes schemer as chief of the Gestapo and the SD, and, as Protector of Czechoslovakia, the hubristic villain surveying his kingdom from his gothic crenelated lair.

The biographical procession of Heydrichs is one of two main threads in this book. The second is the story of Kubis and Gabcik, the two Czechoslovakian paratroopers charged with fulfilling Operation Anthropoid. Much of Binet's more purposeful prose is preserved for this second thread. Trained in Britain, dropped back into Nazi controlled Czechoslavakia in 1941, Kubis and Gabcik are presented as two sincere, determined boys "without a chance in hell of getting out alive." Eager to provide each with a fitting historical testament, and eager also to develop a dynamic to sustain a narrative momentum, Binet carefully delineates the two protagonists of this second thread as balanced, complimentary characters. Whereas Kubis, the Moravian, is tall, quiet, thoughtful and easygoing, Gabcik, the Slovak, is small, sociable, "a fiery ball of energy". Kubis was put in charge of the explosives, Gabcik the machine gun. Their training in Britain, the psychological portraits of them offered up by their superior officers, their acceptance of the mission and subsequent integration into an underground Czechoslovakian community in Prague, and of course their preparation for and implementation of the assassination plan, as well as what became of them afterwards, are details which make for an absorbing story. Binet communicates the story with enthusiasm and skill.

While the stories of Heydrich and of Kubis and Gabcik respectively are Binet's two main threads, the third, subsidiary thread is composed of the succession of narrative interventions, of the aforementioned revisionist kind, and also of the kind that are more direct digressions into the author's life. This third thread is the autobiographical part of the book. It is the part which most distinguishes its very conspicuous postmodern style, and though avowedly subsidiary, its function being to facilitate the two main stories, it is the part which, in hindsight at least, seems to reverberate the most. It is appropriate therefore to finish with a brief discussion of these autobiographical digressions. The first is an early memory of the author's father, "in a few awkward phrases", telling him the story of Operation Anthropoid, which sparked the enthusiasm which later became HHhH, written in part "to reciprocate (the) gift." Beginning with this anecdote from his childhood, Binet intermittently retraces moments of his life, ostensibly as background to lend authenticity to the historical narrative. In 1996 he was a French teacher in a Slovakian military academy. Soon after he met a beautiful Slovak woman, Aurelia, in Prague, and soon after Aurelia there was Natacha, with whom Binet shared the joke that he, with so many books about Nazism lining the shelves in their apartment, was running the risk of ideological conversion. He is quick to remind us that for the "son of a Jewish mother and a Communist father . . . immersed through (his) literary studies in the humanism of Montaigne and the philosophy of the Enlightenment", such a conversion was "obviously impossible." As with the earlier examples, these autobiographical interludes can sometimes be helpful, but sometimes they seem like diversionary procrastination, digressions meant to forge a coherence that HHhH otherwise struggles for. Sometimes they feel altogether like an awkward sleight of hand.

And so it's difficult to summarise this book. I learned about people and places and moments that I knew little or nothing of before. One or two scenes I still remember vividly. The climactic scene for instance, in which Kubis and Gabcik, holed up in a cathedral, under siege from seven hundred SS guards with machine-guns, hand-grenades, tear gas and fire hoses, defend themselves heroically with only pistols, holding out for two hours. A plaque inscribed with their names, photographs of their faces and bullet holes in the stone mark the cathedral on Resslova Street in Prague today. For scenes like this, HHhH is certainly worth reading. For its postmodern, occasionally indulgent stylistic idiosyncrasies, it is difficult to forget. It is perhaps a shame that it's not the other way around.