On Friday 13 November 2015 France suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in its history. In quick succession, gunmen and suicide bombers struck the outer concourse of Paris’s Stade de France; then the pretty canal-side cafés and restaurants of the tenth arrondissement; then, most notoriously, the Bataclan theatre, where the doors were blocked and, over the course of an hour, 90 people massacred.
The subsequent trial was not just a gargantuan administrative undertaking (20 defendants faced around 2,000 plaintiffs, and the proceedings occupied the purpose-built courtroom for the best part of a year); it was a cultural phenomenon. The judicial reckoning with ‘V13’, as the Paris atrocities soon became known, has spawned columns, podcasts, discussion panels and even a Netflix feature that picked through the carnage with all the prurience of a true-crime documentary. It will doubtless generate many literary responses in France, where high culture has always been unusually alert to current events. From all this spectacle, though, it is hard to imagine a book emerging that will manage to be more informative, moving or likely to last than Emmanuel Carrère’s V13.
In some ways Carrère is an unlikely stenographer for France’s trial of the century. Though he is undoubtedly the country’s most distinguished living writer of non-fiction, it is his own life that has tended to draw out his eloquence. His previous book, the 2020 memoir Yoga, considered another terrorist atrocity – namely, the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks – but only insofar as the events deranged his own mind, plunging him into a deep depression that required an emergency course of electroconvulsive therapy.
By contrast, V13 is a remarkably well-behaved piece of reportage.
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