Paul Bryant's Reviews > HHhH

REVIEW : SHORT VERSION

This is a hell of a story, told very engagingly. The last 50 pages are agonizing and heroic and you won’t forget them. Recommended.

REVIEW : LONG VERSION : A QUESTION OF DEFINITION

If I waddled around in an elaborate penguin costume loudly proclaiming that I was a penguin while swallowing fish whole, it wouldn’t make me a penguin. Even if I got all my friends to violently nod their heads and point at me and say yes, he’s a great old penguin, that one, sure he is. Even if I took a plane to Antarctica and joined one of the vast throngs of penguins there, and you filmed me David Attenborough-style, creeping up on me real close while I was looking after my egg which I got a friend to make for me before I came, looks pretty realistic, I still wouldn’t be a penguin.

Whatever everybody – the author, all the critics, and every last review says, this is not a novel. But Mr Binet persuaded the entire universe to go along with his penguin impersonation. And before him, other books have done this too :

Bartleby & Co – a long biographical essay about writers – not a novel
Problems, The Wallcreeper, Love Me Back, What is the What and a zillion others – memoirs, not novels
The Pale King - a random collection of experimental writings, not a novel

None of HHhH is fictitious, it’s either the precise historical information about the events leading to the assassination of one of the all time hall of fame Nazi bastards Reinhard Heydrich – presented in a refreshing casual conversational style (“anyway, let’s talk about something else” he says at one point) but still accurate (getting the details right is one of the main things LB agonises over) or it’s LB’s personal commentary about how he got this book written and the research he did and the problems he found, including such hilarious stuff as telling us that he should have bought a particular book online from Amazon since it was Heydrich’s widow’s memoir (pretty relevant) but he didn’t because it was too pricey and in the wrong language. Several pages later he tells us he finally did get it.

This whole kind of jokey (but really, about such a grisly no-joke subject) self-dramatising angst-ridden approach is exactly the same as a brilliant book by Geoff Dyer called Out of Sheer Rage , an account of how he didn’t write a book about DH Lawrence. Geoff could have called his book a novel, but for some reason he didn’t. Oh wait, that would be because it wasn’t a novel.
What about historical novels like Schindler’s Ark, I Claudius, Wolf Hall, etc? Well in those you can see all the novelistic art, the dialogues, the plotting, the inhabiting of the famous person’s brain and so forth so yes, they are novels.

SOME QUOTES

Unbelievable – I’ve just found another book about the assassination! It’s called Like a Man and it’s by a certain David Chacko. The book is extremely well researched. I get the impression the author has utilized everything currently known about Heydrich and the attack … [LB discusses this novel for a page, pointing out some stuff Chacko made up completely e.g. some sexual scenes]…He’s a skillful cheat. A trickster. Well…a novelist, basically.

[as opposed to LB himself!]

If this were a novel I would have absolutely no need for Valcik. He is more of an encumbrance than anything else

[so, it’s not a novel]

I don’t even know how they reacted when they heard about Heydrich’s death, although that ought to make one of the best bits of my book.

My story has as many holes in it as a novel. But in an ordinary novel, it is the novelist who decides where these holes should occur. Because I am a slave to my scruples, I’m incapable of making that decision.

[so, it’s not….]

LAST MINUTE UPRUSH OF STARS

Around two thirds the way through I was getting a little tired of Mr Binet’s posturings (“look at me having problems writing my book, let me tell you all about them”) and frankly this is way too horrible a subject to be parading like a loud peacock with a tail of woe – just shut up and get on with it – but the last third gets a mighty grip as the assassination plan springs into life and all of what followed makes this – almost – a must read, & swerved the rating from a huffy 2.5 stars to a confident 4 stars.