‘This book is firmly non-religious, and yet there are moments of universal spirituality...' Photo: Book cover of Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo, by Philippe Lançon
Disturbance: Surviving Charlie Hebdo, by Philippe Lançon
Author: Philippe Lançon. Review by Anne M Jones
This riveting book, which I discovered by accident in a secondhand bookshop, transcended the rest of my lockdown book pile. Philippe Lançon is the journalist who ‘played dead’ when terrorists burst into the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on January 7, 2015. This account is a story of personal survival from grossly disfiguring injuries, as well as an informative close-up of the genius within the medical world that repaired him. It is also a sharing of the variety of mental states that occurred within a massively traumatised man, in between erudite philosophical discussions of French classical literature, art and music – in particular Bach’s ‘Well-tempered clavier’. Religious or sentimental it firmly is not, and yet there are moments of universal spirituality that can be found elsewhere in writings that have an avowedly-spiritual purpose. The writing also contains incidental memories from childhood. My own work was in childhood development – and is now preoccupied by concepts of ‘resilience’ among refugees – and I gained a picture of a secure, contented, affection-held boyhood. These experiences undoubtedly helped build the strengths that saw the author through recovery (I hope he will forgive my taking this psychological interest because he states emphatically that he is not interested in psychology). So the book ranges across a wide area of interests. It is an extremely important and valuable contribution to our understanding of life from a number of different perspectives.
Back to January 7, 2015, and the fifty-one-year-old journalist for Liberation and Hebdo describes the mundane tasks of preparing for another working day. He notices the untidiness of his apartment as he closes the door, wondering which of two meetings to prioritise at each workplace. He decides on the latter, locking his bike against a tree outside, a bike that survived untouched, for months afterwards (the book is full of such details, which take on greater significance as the story unfolds). At this point he touches on his reasons for working for these newspapers. They represent freedom of expression in a way that underscores his own beliefs of ‘live and let live’: ‘Freedom reigned there and it was impossible to force anything on anyone.’ Freedom of expression within good-humoured bonds.
At around 11.30am he is about to hurry away to his meeting at Liberation when he pauses – another tiny detail – to show an item of interest in a book to a colleague. This pause saved his life: at that moment the terrorists were entering the building and mowing down anyone in their way. He hears sounds like firecrackers and ‘I thought, but what did I think exactly?... I had probably slipped into a universe in which everything happens in a form that is so violent it is slowed down [and] consciousness no longer has any way of perceiving the instant that destroys it.’ Lançon returns frequently to descriptions of a dual way of thought and perception that have been noted by people under immense stress: ‘naked violence isolates a person from the world and it isolates others who are subjected to it’. He describes the carnage as an observer watching from his position under the table in a pool of blood, the black-clad legs of a terrorist and end of a gun, an image that was to flash by him repeatedly in subsequent months. It takes him a few hours to know and comprehend how seriously injured he has been. His jaw was blown apart and both arms also shot: ‘my face, three quarters intact, had turned me into a monster.’
In the tangle of events that follow – hospital, contacting family, cancelling prior engagements – there are pauses for the tenderness of family compassion. When his parents, in their eighties, arrive he thinks ‘I wanted to console them as much as they were consoling me’, a theme that will be familiar to those of us who have known serious illness as an unexpected bridge between parent and adult child.
Realising there is nothing more demanded of him than that he restore his health, Lançon feels ‘almost the happiness of Captain Nemo in the Nautilus, but without bitterness, or anger’. He references works of great literature in exploring his own thought processes during the stages of his healing in particular – like Proust, whose writing moves in and out of time remembered and time in the present. In the course of his musings he refers to the quiet, dedicated care shown by a variety of nurses and other staff, respectfully evoking their lives, their own personal griefs and worlds. Here, the reader perceives mutual respect, understanding and care.
The book is a pageturner in that one is unsure how he will recover, not least given that his face has been destroyed. The suspense hangs over until near the end, because of the complexities and intricacies of restoring a face via skin grafts from intact parts of his body. It is the work of an artistic as well as medical genius. At the same time Lançon draws attention to the responsibility of the victim, who has to respond as carers and onlookers are hoping. He also records the poignant words of his surgeon: ‘We were so afraid that if it did not work we would all have failed.’
Lançon refers to how he continued writing for his newspapers after only a few days, in spite of the discomfort that it brought, and to the occasional response that showed clear indifference to his incapacitated condition.
His attitude towards the killers is infrequently alluded to, but a quotation from one of his Arab nurses seems to echo Lançon’s own views: ‘He told me he was nauseated by the imbecility of the acts of the killers.’ During the first days in hospital comes the gradual knowledge that eleven of his colleagues have been killed. Now he has this overwhelming grief to deal with, in addition to everything else. Hearing that two of the terrorists have been tracked down and killed leaves him indifferent: ‘I don’t ask why’. (The words of Hannah Arendt come to mind, the ‘banality of evil’.) Once he is strong enough, he needs major surgery to reconstruct his jaw. The account of this meticulous, complex procedure is breathtaking and artistic in its precision, but not without its secondary difficulties. Little is written about pain as pain, though Lançon muses upon its nature after a friend quotes Nietzsche’s reference to ‘wisdom in pain’. He writes about how pain contributes to the preservation of the human species.
This book contains acts of forgiveness, acts of generosity and acts of compassion – much like those that many of us witnessed during lockdown. It confirmed for me something that has long preoccupied me: that these acts are not confined to a religious few but are the everyday self-expectation within many people.
This is an important, wise book, about survival and everyday heroism that goes unremarked. It is an insight into French life but, above all, a book that says ‘Let us be kind to one another’.
