For 10 months, between September 2021 and June 2022, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère went every day to the Palais de Justice in Paris. He was there to attend the trial of a group of men accused of involvement in the terrorist attacks carried out in that city in November 2015, in which Islamic State militants massacred 130 people and injured hundreds more. The trial, which became known in the media as “V13”– the attacks took place on Friday (Vendredi) 13th – was the longest in French legal history, and among the most high profile.
Carrère’s book V13, published in English translation this month, is the result of those months spent in court, listening to the testimonies of the survivors, the bereaved and those defendants connected to the attacks who remained alive. (The terrorists themselves – the men who shot and killed all those Parisians at the Bataclan theatre, the attackers outside the Stade de France and on the streets outside restaurants and cafes – were all killed, either in the suicide attacks of that night or in police shootouts.)
At times, V13 is almost unbearably painful to read, in particular in its relation of the testimonies of the survivors. There is a chapter called In the Pit that relays what happened at the Bataclan from the points of view of several concert-goers. Gaëlle: “I knew that I’d been badly wounded when I tried to get the shoe of the guy lying on top of me out of my face. That was when I saw that my cheek had been ripped off and was hanging down beside my face. I put my right hand into my mouth to pull out my teeth so that I wouldn’t choke on them, because otherwise I could gag and attract the terrorists’ attention.” Lydia: “You move, you die. We pretend to be dead. Mobiles ring non-stop, with those distinctive iPhone jingles that still chill my blood six years later.”
Again and again, victims describe the smell of blood and gunpowder, the calm “relish” with which the killers move around the room shooting people, the “human confetti” that rains down when the terrorists explode their suicide vests, and finally the rescue. Édith: “They got us to stand up and walk towards the exit in single file with our hands on our heads. They told us not to look, but I couldn’t help looking. The sea of thick black blood that kept getting bigger and bigger. All of those bodies that were drinking and dancing just an hour earlier.”
The book began as a series of columns Carrère wrote for the French news weekly Le Nouvel Obs. As such, it’s a kind of contemporaneous diary of the trial, filled with sketches and observations of its vast gallery of characters. As a portrait of a trial and its participants – young working-class Muslim men pulled, to varying degrees, into an orbit of Islamist extremism; Parisian lawyers and journalists; families and friends processing their rage and sadness in a variety of ways – the book’s material is that of a sprawling social novel, laying bare a country cross-sectioned at an incision point of trauma.
“I’m glad you think so, and I hope it’s true,” says Carrère, when I put this to him over Zoom. (His English is perfectly good, but he wanted, in the interest of precision, to have an interpreter on the call; this was John Lambert, a longtime friend of Carrère who is responsible for the excellent English translation of V13.) “But I wasn’t looking to write a kind of nonfiction social novel when I started. What I was looking for was something about law, something about how the justice system works. In fact, when I started I didn’t even know it was going to be a book.”
Writers, Carrère tells me, tend naturally to be interested in trials because they are a raw form of drama. “The narrative, the spectacle, the theatre of it all is fascinating. And even though the journalists who go to a trial all witness the same spectacle, everybody sees it in their own way. And what was special in this trial was the nature of the involvement of the state. The state wanted the trial to be exemplary. They wanted, in a way, a symbol of the response of democracy to barbarity. And I was kind of sceptical about this at first, but in fact that is what happened.”
Although it’s not a case the book explicitly makes, it does present a kind of defence of the French justice system as a humane and humanistic institution. Running beneath this account of the day-by-day business of the court is a sense that to try to get to the truth of that day, from the points of view of both the victims and the defendants, is a good in itself.
Early in V13, Carrère writes of a brother and sister, Aristide and Alice, who survived the attack with severe gunshot wounds, and who give their testimonies at the trial. Aristide speaks of his desire to understand how young people could decide to shoot other young people. Perhaps there is nothing to understand, he says, but he is glad that they can be questioned, that the trial is taking place. “The fact that they’re here, talking to us,” writes Carrère of the siblings’ testimonies, “is already justice.”
Because the men who committed the actual atrocities are all dead, the defendants at the centre of the trial are, for the most part, bit players who assisted in some way, wittingly or otherwise, those terrorists. Only one of the defendants, a Belgian named Salah Abdeslam, was directly involved in the plot: he was supposed to blow himself up at the Stade de France, along with the other suicide bombers he drove there, but he backed out at the last minute, put his suicide vest in a bin and went on the run. Although there is never any question of Abdeslam being innocent, the trial (and the book) has to consider whether he backed out because of moral qualms about taking the lives of others, or simply because he lacked the courage to end his own in the process.
Carrère speaks with empathy about the more minor players among the defendants, those whose connection to the attacks was more or less tangential. One particular defendant, Farid Kharkhach, made fake IDs that were used by the terrorists but insisted, fairly plausibly, that he had no idea what he was involved in. Carrère would see him eating his lunch outside the court and felt tremendous pity for him, a petty criminal who forged documents for the wrong people and wound up on the stand in the largest terrorist trial in French history. He was a loving father who, Carrère writes, could not bear to tell his own young children that he was on trial for associating with terrorists. When they came to see him in prison, he told them that he was not a prisoner but rather a guard.
V13’s pages are scattered with such surprising details, moments of unexpected humanity. Typically, Carrère tells me, writers who write about trials are interested in the perpetrators. But the defendants in this case were of much less interest to him, he says, than the plaintiffs. “The plaintiffs,” he says, “that was where the real story lay. In the impressive nobility of these people.”
And it’s their stories that are the book’s most compelling and richly rendered. You get the sense that he could well have written an entire book about any number of these people: about the young woman who kept on her person, in a plastic tube, a metal bolt that embedded itself in her cheek in an explosion at the Stade de France; about Georges Salines, whose son was killed at the Bataclan and who conducted a series of conversations, later published as a book, with Azdyne Amimour, whose son blew himself up on the stage.
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Carrère is one of the most exciting and formally innovative of current nonfiction writers. He is best known for his book The Adversary, about the conman and murderer Jean-Claude Romand, which was published in French in 2000, and the following year in English, to widespread acclaim and major commercial success. It is, as far as I’m concerned, among the greatest ever works of literary nonfiction. (I first got in contact with Carrère a couple of years ago, after I’d written my book A Thread of Violence, because I wanted him to know how much The Adversary, and his work generally, had meant to me as a model. My out-of-the-blue email to him remains the only actual fan letter I’ve ever written.)
As someone whose work also focuses on the darker aspects of human nature, I was curious, as I read V13, about Carrère’s own interest in such subjects – in violence, and pain, and human perversity. I tell him that I am often asked why I tend to focus on such dark stories, that I am perpetually at a loss to answer such a question, and that I often wonder how he would answer it.
“It’s not that easy for me to answer either,” he says, speaking in English. “And sometimes, it’s not only that I myself don’t understand, it’s also that I’m a bit ashamed. I feel, well, why do I have an interest in such horrible things?”
He pauses for a long time, considering the question. Then he breaks his silence with a chuckle, and a resigned shrug. “Well, I suppose,” he says, “it’s good stories, and everybody is interested in them. It’s about humanity. But there is also one other thing: I think we are – you and me, and perhaps some of our fellow writers – interested in the kind of criminals with whom we can identify, at least a little. With whom we can say, well, in other circumstances, maybe I would be able to do something like that.”
There were stretches in the early months of the trial, says Carrère, that he found very difficult: these narratives of pain and loss were cumulatively almost too much to bear. “There were moments that were so, so terrible,” he said. “I had nightmares. And it was impossible to share it with my wife, my friends, because if you were not sitting in that hall, you could not understand it.
“But as a writer,” he continues, raising a hand for emphasis, “it was OK. As a writer, I loved it.” There was the extraordinary material unfolding in front of him, and there was the presence of a framework, in the form of the commitment to a weekly column – an imperative he found strangely liberating. “There was never a fear of the white page.”
Although hardly a straightforward work of journalism, V13 is less insistently autobiographical than much of Carrère’s previous work – and certainly less so than the recent, genre-agnostic Yoga, a raw and intimate account of a mental breakdown suffered at a meditation retreat.
In his early work, throughout the 1980s and 90s, Carrère moved back and forth between novels and nonfiction projects: a critical text on the films of Werner Herzog; a historical novel about the writing of Frankenstein; a book about Philip K Dick; a surreal novella called The Moustache, about a man whose life falls to pieces when he shaves off his moustache and everyone around him insists he never had one to begin with. It was The Adversary, however, that marked a major inflection point, and where Carrère really became Carrère. (He has long had a parallel, or complementary, career in film and television.)
As a true-crime book, The Adversary is written not so much in the tradition of In Cold Blood as against it. Where Truman Capote wrote his masterpiece as a “nonfiction novel”, scrupulously removing all trace of his own presence from the story (even where he was intimately involved), Carrère put himself close to the centre. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read the book, but even now when I read its opening sentences they still retain the power to shock me:
“On the Saturday morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our eldest son. He was five years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand did with his, whom he killed after their meal.”
At both the sentence and narrative level, he moves nimbly between disparate narrative points of view, his writing continually acknowledging and examining its own subjectivity. In all of the books he has published since – including the memoirs My Life As a Russian Novel, Other Lives But Mine and Yoga; The Kingdom, about the foundation of Christianity and the writing of the Gospels; and Limonov, a biography of the Russian sci-fi writer and ultranationalist extremist Eduard Limonov – Carrère has expanded on the radical proposition of those lines.
This self-absorption – Carrère’s capacity to write himself and his life into any story, even about the foundation of Christianity – is equal to his ability to empathise with other people. It is not merely that he doesn’t want to think outside himself, it’s that he sees himself in others, and others in himself.
If the queasy fascination of The Adversary and Limonov is Carrère’s ability to place himself in uncomfortable proximity to men who do terrible things, in V13 Carrère found himself identifying most strongly with the parents of the victims, he tells me; people of roughly his age, whose children were roughly the age of his own. The book contains many portraits of them: studies, variously, in pain, strength and human forbearance.
Among the most vivid is that of Nadia Mondeguer, whose 30-year-old daughter Lamia was killed in the attacks. Nadia, who was born in Cairo, is from a family of Palestinian Christians; she has a deep interest in Islam and in Arab culture, and wrote a master’s thesis on the Syrian scholar Muhammad Rashid Rida, whose writings were an inspiration to the founders of the Muslim Brotherhood, and to what later became the Islamist movement. At the end of the book, Carrère writes about her return to Cairo, three years after her daughter’s death. In a park at sunset, she tells a stranger, a policeman, about her daughter and what happened to her, and he tells her that Lamia, and those other victims who died with her, are shaheed, martyrs. “To hear from the mouth of this Egyptian policeman that they were martyrs,” writes Carrère, “and not the killers who attributed this dignity to themselves from the depths of their crass, manipulated ignorance, it was as if the world was falling back into place.”
It’s an important moment at the end of the book: an instance of beauty and tentative redemption. And when it comes, it feels deeply, and arduously, earned: you feel that Carrère has been through it with Nadia, and with her fellow plaintiffs, and that he has taken you with him. (He and Nadia, he tells me, became good friends during the course of the trial.)
It wouldn’t be true to say that V13 reads like a novel. It reads like what it is: an episodic account of a sprawling and complex trial. But its final chapters are among the most remarkable stretches in Carrère’s oeuvre. As it draws to a close, he describes a dreamlike evening, right after the verdicts have been handed down, in which all the players in the grand drama of the trial – the countless lawyers, the journalists, the plaintiffs and their families, even some of the acquitted defendants – gather in a brasserie across the street from the Palais de Justice.
There’s an extraordinary fluidity to the milieu, which is strangely evocative of the closing night of a long theatrical run. There is something celebratory about the scene: not just a relief at the conclusion of the trial, but a celebration of its ambition and scale. And there is the fact, too, of its taking place on the terrace of a Paris restaurant, not unlike the sites where the terrorists gunned down so many victims on the night of the attacks. (“The terraces have won!” someone bawls, amid the drunken clamour.) It’s a celebration, in its way, of Paris, of its persistence and beauty in the wake of horror. It’s also, movingly, a group portrait of the figures Carrère has sketched throughout the book.
“That’s what I am,” says Carrère. “I consider myself a portraitist. And so it’s really a gallery of portraits, this book. And a trial is a great place for a portraitist.”
• V13: Chronicle of a Trial by Emmanuel Carrère (Fern) is published on 14 November. To order a copy for £18 go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
