The initials for Laurent Binet’s first novel, HHhH, stood for “Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich” (“Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”). This tricksy debut was a book about writing a book about the assassination of Gestapo boss Reinhard Heydrich by Czech agents. With a conversational narrative voice lifted from Milan Kundera, it offered the excitement of a wartime thriller while raising lofty questions about the ethics of writing such a piece in the first place. It worked — and won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman in 2010.
Binet’s pointy-headed tendencies sharpened in his next novel, The 7th Function of Language, written under the spell of Umberto Eco. A Paris-set conspiracy romp centred on the unlikely subject of French literary theory, it followed a tough-talking cop and a left-wing lecturer who sniff something fishy when the critic Roland Barthes dies (as he really did) after a road accident following lunch with the future French president François Mitterrand in 1980.
Now comes Civilisations, which plays with a “what if?”. Imagine that Christopher Columbus never made it back to Spain but instead died in Cuba — and that the Incas weren’t conquered by Spain but instead invaded Europe, replacing Christianity with sun worship. Sounds interesting, right? Well, it ought to be, but by God (or Inti, if you are a devotee of the Inca sun god) is this book dry.
The bulk of it is a chronicle centred on the Incan emperor Atahualpa, the closest we get to a main character. After some briskly described bloodshed he brings about a short-lived “episode of happiness in the history of the New World” — establishing “a Europe of tolerance” in which land is “divided according to each man’s needs”, with redistributive tax laws and better workers’ rights. It doesn’t seem entirely irrelevant that Binet once wrote a book about shadowing François Hollande on the campaign trail for the French presidency in 2012.
In The 7th Function of Language Binet struggled to dramatise the stakes involved in his speculative scenario, even for those au fait with the cultural and political figures he was sending up. In Civilisations he finds it harder still, relying on hammy cliffhangers to stir interest (“She didn’t know what role fate had in store . . . She didn’t know anything about what would happen next”). Set-piece battles are described with all the vigour of chess notation and too many of his sentences seem to be influenced by the kind of term papers he must have marked in his past life as a history teacher: “Under no circumstances were the princes willing to forsake the substantial revenues that they drew from the resources of the lands and the labour of their peasants, which was the basis of their civil life, with its privileges for the nobility dating back to time immemorial.”
Advertisement
True, the distant tone enables some enjoyably tart humour about European mores as seen through Incan eyes. They find Catholicism “absurdly complex”, but “nevertheless . . . understood two things: there was a place called Rome, which all the shaved men held in reverence, and a priest called Luther who got them all worked up”. And things hot up when the Aztecs also cross the Atlantic — England is overrun by Scots and Mexicans — yet even here the turf war unfolds in the wings, merely alluded to in an epistolary exchange. Binet never quite seems to have figured out how to tell the story: the chronicle’s supposedly non-European perspective (“an artist called Michelangelo”, “a city called Venice”) seems a sham when the narrator also accesses the thoughts of Philip II, the King of Spain.
There’s an unflattering comparison with another French “what if?” bestseller, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, about a future Islamic government in France. For good or ill, that book found a devilishly viable form for its concept, unfolding through the first-person testimony of a washed-up university lecturer who believes he has a right to female companionship. By contrast, Civilisations always feels like an idea, not a novel.
Civilisations by Laurent Binet, trans Sam Taylor, Harvill Secker, 320pp; £16.99
