The Frenchman’s novel about the blurred line between fiction and reality, The 7th Function of Language, is all the more poignant in the era of Trump, Le Pen and fake news

The walls may be covered with vintage cigarette adverts and the traditional pewter bartop may gleam, but dining at an authentically French restaurant in central London still requires a certain suspension of disbelief. For Laurent Binet, however, an author whose work treads a careful line between truth and fiction, the bistrot’s faint air of unreality seems a perfect venue.

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Binet’s first novel, HHhH, wove together a gripping war story of an operation to assassinate a high-ranking Nazi in Prague with authorial interventions exploring his struggle to give a faithful account of what actually happened. The courage of the commandos parachuted behind enemy lines is never in doubt, nor the appalling brutality of the man they are sent to kill. But was the general’s car black or green? Should a novelist rewrite a conversation if the dialogue a witness recalls is thoroughly implausible? Can historical reality be glimpsed behind the bright veneer of fiction? This deft combination of ripping yarn and postmodern reflection on truth won Binet the Goncourt first novel prize in 2010 and plaudits from Martin Amis and Bret Easton Ellis when it appeared in English two years later.

His latest novel, The 7th Function of Language (translated by Sam Taylor), is another historical thriller circling the same questions, but approaching them from the opposite direction.

“It’s two faces of the same obsession, which is the complicated relationship between reality and fiction,” says Binet. “In HHhH I wanted to search for historical truth and in this one it was much more playful. I wanted to have fun and to twist the rope of truth until it broke.”

The novel grew from the strange death of the literary theorist Roland Barthes. On 25 February 1980, Barthes interrupted his work on an essay about Stendhal to attend one of the future president François Mitterrand’s regular cultural lunches. Crossing the Rue des Écoles on his way home, he was knocked down by a laundry van. A month later, he was dead.

But what if the collision was no accident? What if the two events were somehow connected?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I hate this blackmail: choose between the fascist plague or the financial capitalist tuberculosis’ … Binet on Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. Photograph: Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images

“Barthes was a semiotician,” Binet explains, “and I thought that, in a way, semiotics is the science of investigation, the science of Sherlock Holmes.” If, as Barthes suggests, the study of signs moves beyond language to encompass the whole world, then Holmes, with his deft readings of his clients and their predicaments, becomes a master of critical theory. “And so I thought that maybe I could use that very academic science for something very concrete: a detective investigation.”

The game is afoot when Barthes winds up in hospital and French spooks discover he is working on a new way of using language that would give a speaker unlimited powers of persuasion – with explosive implications for the impending 1981 presidential election and people in positions of power around the world. Superintendent Pierre Bayard sets off in pursuit of the missing papers that will unlock Barthes’s secret, recruiting a literary theorist from the grooviest university in Paris as his guide. Simon Herzog rapidly becomes the novel’s semiological Holmes, offering a series of increasingly sophisticated readings of suspects, situations and his own position within the novel.

From Paris to Bologna, Venice to New York, they uncover an international conspiracy and a secret society that could have been drawn from the pages of a novel by Umberto Eco. The Italian philosopher indeed appears as an avuncular mastermind alongside larger-than-life versions of the stars of 1980s literary theory and philosophy. We encounter Michel Foucault tangling with a gigolo in a gay sauna, Gilles Deleuze watching tennis in an apartment that smells of philosophy and stale tobacco, Julia Kristeva in league with the Bulgarian secret police.

After the self-imposed constraints of HHhH, the anguished pursuit of accuracy, Binet says unshackling his imagination was a release. “It was exhilarating, it was scary, the absolute freedom. You feel like God, because I realised I could do whatever I wanted. If I wanted to kill someone, I’d kill them. It was fun.” He recalls his glee when he decided to send one of his favourite philosophers to an untimely death. “I remembered Stephen King saying that if you can kill a character, kill him. My editor told me, ‘You can’t do that, you can’t kill him off.’ And I was so happy and just answered, ‘Yes, I can; I just did’.”

As the exuberant mixture of fact and fiction spirals further into paranoia and suspicion, Eco plays a vital part as character and inspiration. “I knew he would be a character, because he was a good friend of Barthes and a semiotician, too,” say Binet. “But then I gave him an important role and I think it’s logical. The terrain of the novel is close to The Name of the Rose, but The 7th Function follows his theories more closely than his novels, as when Eco wonders what it means to imagine if Sherlock Holmes is married, because he doesn’t exist. I tried to play with those questions in a novel.”

Binet layers truths and fictions into ever more elaborate constructions, and his detective finds it increasingly difficult to escape the feeling that he is trapped within a novel. A conference at Cornell promising talks from Noam Chomsky and Edward Said finds room for Morris Zapp, the fictional don from David Lodge’s novels Changing Places and Small World. The lecture Zapp gives, using ideas drawn from the real-life academic who inspired Lodge’s creation, Stanley Fish, only adds further fuel to Herzog’s paranoia. How can he tell if the novel in which he is enmeshed is nearing its conclusion? What if he is only an incidental character who won’t even make it to the final act? Binet points out that, while the narrator of HHhH wonders if fiction can ever measure up to the demands of history, his semiological detective is never in any doubt of fiction’s capabilities. For Herzog, “Fiction is dangerous because it’s powerful.”

A novel featuring real people can be dangerous in the outside world as well, particularly if some of those people are still alive. The 7th Function has Bernard-Henri Lévy jockeying for position in his trademark unbuttoned white shirt and Camille Paglia hectoring passers-by in a futile one-woman protest. The harshest portrait is of the novelist and critic Philippe Sollers, who is painted as a self-aggrandising dandy and finds himself at the sharp end of the novel’s denouement. Not that Binet was interested in revealing the secrets of his characters’ real private lives. “Following in Barthes’ footsteps, I wanted to play with their myths, their legends. I’m not really concerned with what Eco or Sollers were actually like, I just wanted to play with their public images.”

Sollers’ friends were very aggressive. I don’t think they were very fair … In a way, he proved I was right about him

Perhaps the root of Binet’s cavalier approach to public reputation is his impression of being an outsider. Born in the leafy Parisian suburb of Yvelines in 1972, he says he has always felt “on the margins … I don’t feel Parisian, I don’t feel as if I come from the countryside; I’m from the suburbs.” While some of his characters appreciated his irreverent take on a golden age of French culture, others didn’t find the joke quite so funny.

“Sollers was very, very pissed off,” Binet says. “Sollers’ friends were very, very aggressive. It was a bit tiring. I can’t deny that I was mocking him ... but I don’t think they were very fair … I shouldn’t have expected anything less from Sollers and his followers. In a way, he proved I was right about him.”

The row quickly spilled out from the narrow world of French publishing, with Sollers reportedly threatening a lawsuit and his supporters labelling the novel misogynistic and fascistic. But the accusation which Binet says upset him the most was that he was attacking Barthes, his circle and his ideas. “That couldn’t be further from the truth … I couldn’t have spent five years of my life with all those people if I hated them, if I wasn’t interested in their thinking. I don’t pretend I understand everything they say, but I trust them to be very stimulating.”

Two years later, Binet shrugs off the dispute, but he is intrigued by the suggestion that his obsession with the line between truth and fiction may have been stoked by an earlier controversy.

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At the turn of the millennium, Binet was teaching literature at a secondary school in Saint-Denis, one of Paris’s most deprived suburban regions. When his warts-and-all memoir of an academic year, La Vie Professionelle de Laurent B, appeared in 2004, it met with positive reviews. But after a senior colleague objected to the way Binet had portrayed him in the book and threatened to sue, the author was transferred to a different school.

“Maybe it was my first experience of fake news,” Binet says. “I tried to be really honest and I discovered that some people who were witnesses, who were part of it, said, ‘No, it’s not true,’ although I knew it was true. I had always known in the abstract that there was a problem with the truth, but I experienced it directly.” In our post-truth era, the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump have given us all a similar wake-up call, Binet continues. “Looking at history, we knew that everything is possible, but we hadn’t experienced it yet. Now we know anything is possible.”

As the son of communists and a lifelong leftwinger, Binet had been hoping the leftist candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, could find an unlikely route to the second round of the French presidential election on 7 May. He is bitter and angry that it has come down to a runoff between the centrist Emmanuel Macron and the far-right Marine Le Pen.

“I’ll vote Macron, but I hate having to do it,” he says, “I hate those who force me to make such a choice and I understand those who won’t, because I hate this blackmail: choose between the fascist plague or the financial capitalist tuberculosis.” Binet doesn’t think Le Pen will win, but he doesn’t rule anything out: “Who wants to vote for a banker?”

But there is no reason to give up hope, he believes. “If everything is possible, it means that we don’t have to expect the worst. Of course, you have to worry, you have to be careful, but there’s no reason for despair.” He says the left can succeed if it can control how the debate is framed, if it can win the battle of language. “You can win telling the truth or you can win lying, but it’s really about the form, which is the definition of literature.”

The 7th Function ends with Herzog struggling to assert his place as the hero of his own story. “I wrote the last chapter not long after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, and you can see traces of it when the character is complaining about the author as he would complain against God. He wants to escape his fate, to believe that nothing is written in advance. It was both a way for me to show how I despise everything about religion, about some God deciding everything, and at the same time to hope that you can escape your fate. I hope we can escape Le Pen,” he smiles. “And hopefully we will survive Trump.”

• The 7th Function of Language is published by Harvill Secker. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £16.99), go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99