V13: a 'marvelous and terrifying' account of the Bataclan terror trials

In September 2021, the largest criminal trial in French history got under way at the Palais de Justice in Paris. In the dock were 20 defendants, accused of helping to plan and organise what became known as "V13": the attacks of Friday (vendredi) 13 November 2015, at the Bataclan theatre and other locations in Paris, which killed 130 and injured hundreds.

Everything about the trial was "unprecedented", said Chris Power in The Guardian: it lasted nine months, involved nearly 400 lawyers and magistrates, and took place in a 650 square metre purpose-built courtroom. The legal brief ran to more than a million pages. Watching it all was the celebrated non-fiction writer Emmanuel Carrère, who was covering the proceedings for the news magazine L'Obs. Now, he has expanded his reports into a superbly crafted – and "absolutely gripping" – book.

Carrère, best known as an introspective memoirist, seems an "unlikely stenographer for France's trial of the century", said Thomas P. Lambert in The Spectator. Yet "V13" is a "remarkably well-behaved piece of reportage". While Carrère is a presence the book – he describes befriending the mother of one of the victims, which conveniently allows his attention to "wander outside the courtroom" – he also knows when to step back and "let the horrors speak for themselves".

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This he does most powerfully in one "nightmarish" section, a lengthy reconstruction of what happened at the Bataclan, stitched from the "fragments of testimony" of those trapped inside. Only one actual assailant stood trial at the Palais de Justice, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times. Like the nine other gunmen, Salah Abdeslam was "supposed to blow himself up", but decided not to at the last minute. More than once during "V13", Carrère recalls something the terrorist told police: "Everything you say about us jihadists is like reading the last page of a book. What you should do is read the book from the start." The quote strikes Carrère as profound, but as the trial progresses, he comes to view Abdeslam as an "abysmal void wrapped in lies".

In the end, the victims interest him much more than the perpetrators, said Will Lloyd in The Sunday Times. As he hears about people who were "prepared to sacrifice themselves so that others could live", or who stayed with partners who'd been disabled or disfigured, he is "awed" by their courage and goodness. Ultimately, this "marvellous and terrifying" book concludes that "good is actually more interesting than evil, and a harder philosophical problem to solve".