HHhH

HHhH, the debut novel from Laurent Binet, tells the story of Operation Anthropoid, two Czechoslovakian parachutists' mission to assassinate Nazi commander Reinhard Heydrich. With skill Binet guides us through Heydrich's cruel ascent to power, the Resistance fighters' preparations and the crucial showdown in Prague. But Binet also shows us something less familiar to the historical novel.

Interwoven with the narrative of the Nazi monster and the Resistance heroes is the narrator's own story. He regularly digresses from Operation Anthropoid for brief asides on the nature of historical fiction and the impossibility of ever reconstructing historical events with absolute accuracy. The novel is made up of short, self-referential chapters, hopping from 1942 to the present day where the narrator struggles with ideas of veracity as he writes the book. Lines such as 'there is nothing more artificial in a historical narrative than this kind of dialogue' and 'once again I find myself frustrated by my genre's constraints' should give you some idea of what to expect. While this might seem like a familiar form of postmodernism, don't despair.

The strong voice of the narrator, utterly charming and brilliantly translated from the French by Sam Taylor, saves this from becoming another creaking postmodern frame with little substance. At the outset he tells us that this story is very personal to him, was told to him by his father when he was young, and has been a source fascination to him ever since, providing some explanation for his fussiness over apparently inconsequential details, such as the colour of Heydrich's car.

With the disdain of the fanatic for lesser representations of these events, he condemns one novel based on Heydrich that 'reads almost like a joke'. In another comic moment our narrator interrupts events in 1942 to write about an argument with his girlfriend, which ends with her calling him 'a little shit', before swiftly returning to the action. With this endearing voice Binet manages to balance a gripping World War II thriller with meditations on fiction and truth.