By Laurent Binet, 2013
I got tired of this novel quite quickly. It is potentially a thrilling historical novel, with fascinating characters and extreme actions at the heart of a critical point in 20th century history. Yet the author deliberately makes his story hard to read.
I had heard of Reinhardt Heydrich as an architect of the “final solution” to murder the Jewish population of Germany and its wartime territories. In this story, he comes across as a charismatic, ambitious overachiever who lies, manipulates and kills people who get in his way. In spite of an inauspicious early life, he quickly rises to the top ranks of the SS, and consolidates power by sucking up to Heinrich Himmler and eliminating opposition. In this telling, he is responsible for planning and executing the “night of the long knives,” when the Nazi party leadership killed their opposition within the party. He is appointed administrator of Czechoslovakia after Germany occupies the country in 1939.
The exiled Czechoslovak government in London decides to kill Heydrich, and sends a two-person team – one Czech and one Slovak – to work with the underground on an assassination plot. Through several mishaps, they carry out the plot, escape, are betrayed and fight a heroic standoff against hoards of the German Army. This would be an exciting thriller, and Binet points out that aspects of the story have been highlighted in several movies and novels.
Yet Binet deliberately breaks up the storyline with frequent comments about his process, historical writing and readers’ expectations. Sometimes he intrudes to say this is not the romanticized way most writers would present it, but it is the historical fact. Other times, he stops to say that he has just made up a section to make the story more engaging. Sometimes he talks about his sources and how unreliable they are.
All of this seems to be intended to focus the reader’s attention on the constructed nature of the narrative. As he points out, writers use a variety of techniques to make their story more interesting, to fill in missing details, to persuade the reader to accept their version of the story. This critical perspective is important, especially for historical writing where there is a temptation to accept what the author gives us without being conscious of the fact that it is one person’s reconstruction from a selection of the available bits of information. The first few times Binet broke in to shift the focus to the meta-picture, I was intrigued. After Binet had made the point several times, in a variety of different ways, I began to think, okay, we get the point. Half way through the book, I felt it had reached the point of irritating overkill.
There are many interesting historical notes. Binet shows the lies and phoney justifications behind Hitler’s seizure of Czechoslovakia, and the futile choices that were left to the weak Czech government facing an overwhelmingly powerful opponent. These seem to have a direct parallel in the Russian, Israeli and even American military aggression of today, in which lies are used as a transparent excuse for the exercise of military power. Binet describes the Theresienstadt concentration camp in occupied Czech territories as a model camp intended to address concerns of Germans about stories they are hearing about the treatment of Jewish prisoners. I’d heard of Theresienstadt as a model for international observers, but had not thought of it as a way to respond to internal dissent.
However, the nature of the story calls even these details into question. Since Binet apparently wants readers to question historical accounts, we have to say that they are interesting points for consideration, subject to further examination. Who are we to believe? Certainly not a novel-writer who deliberately calls his own sources and observations into question. This makes the whole book more than a little frustrating, which I suppose is the point. Truth is not objective, it’s something we have to weigh and balance. This is a valid message, and perhaps there is value in making it in the form of a novel. But it does not make an enjoyable read.
