Until fairly recently, anyone asked to name France’s most prominent living author might well have said Michel Houellebecq, who shot to prominence in the 1990s and 00s with his novels Whatever, Atomised and Platform, pungent satires that ruthlessly insisted on sex as just another commodity in a marketplace of winners and losers. (A more likely name on readers’ lips now would probably be 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux, who also writes of sex, and who was publishing long before Houellebecq but was somewhat damningly more or less invisible in the anglosphere until the past decade.)
Houellebecq’s later novels come in all stripes – sci-fi in The Possibility of an Island, or the art-world caper of The Map and the Territory, in which Houellebecq gets murdered – but it’s the incel-adjacent vibe of his best-known work that has decisively shaped his reputation. But only with his dismal 2019 novel, Serotonin, about a civil servant stalking his ex-girlfriend as the gilets jaunes protests come to the boil, did time seem to be up for Houellebecq, whose work seemed almost crushed by the weight of its own instinct for provocation. His most recent book was a short, score-settling memoir, Quelques mois dans ma vie (A Few Months in My Life), responding to a controversy over Islamophobic remarks in which he predicted a “reverse Bataclan”. The title also told of how he was tricked – with little difficulty – into taking the lead role in a Dutch porn film that he later sought to suppress.
Not for nothing does the narrator of Lauren Elkin’s recent novel Scaffolding observe with tacit approval that her ex-boyfriend “no longer reads Houellebecq”. Whatever he’s working on now, Annihilation is the long-awaited English translation (by Shaun Whiteside) of his novel published in 2022, before Quelques mois … and everything it recounts. What does it have to offer? Something of a hotchpotch, it’s his longest book yet, and does – true to form – ultimately turn on the willingness of the main character’s wife to give a three-hour blowjob and walk around naked from the waist down while “almost permanently wet”. More surprisingly – and far from unenjoyably – Annihilation is also an occult-steeped pulp mystery, a political thriller centred on deepfakes and cyber-attacks as well everyday tragedy in the shape of grave medical emergencies, to say nothing – yes – of the protagonist’s struggle to get his end away.
Civil servants Paul and Prudence have been in a sexless marriage for the past 10 years. They don’t have children, their mortgage is paid off, but they lead separate lives in the same Paris apartment, having previously quarrelled over her conversion to veganism. He works late into the night as right-hand man to the French finance minister, who has been targeted by hackers with a faked video of his beheading.
Paul’s troubles worsen when he has to deal with family in-fighting that follows his father’s stroke, as well as the shock of returning to his boyhood bedroom, which brings home how much his wife resembles Carrie-Anne Moss in The Matrix, still pinned to his wall. And his dad – a retired intelligence director – has a file that seems to indicate foreknowledge of the cyber-attacks…
Houellebecq doesn’t normally write from multiple points of view and he finds himself saying “Meanwhile” or “At more or less the same time” a fair bit as he cuts between characters. But for all the book’s affinity with Dan Brown, Annihilation’s peculiar vigour keeps you on your toes. Paul’s view that his sister is “a better-quality human being” prompts a footnote about the difficulty of establishing a metric. You turn a page and find yourself faced with a diagram of a guillotine, a pentangle atop a map of Europe, a picture of a demon and many passages reciting Paul’s nightmares. It’s just as disconcerting, if more predictable, to needlessly dip into a doctor’s point of view simply to hear her sexual fantasies, or to witness Paul say of his dentist that “there was nothing to suggest that he was Islamist, or even Muslim”.
The plot’s wild twists and turns compete for the reader’s interest with Houellebecq’s usual grandstanding on culture and society. To value the life of a child over the life of an adult is, someone says, to “deprive life of all motivation and meaning; very precisely, this is what is called nihilism. Devaluing the past and the present in favour of times to come … the original sin of Christianity, in my eyes, is hope.” (The ensuing silence is broken thus: “Right, sorry, I let myself get a bit carried away … Let’s get back to our action.”) A lower birthrate causes fret: “What was the point of installing 5G if you simply couldn’t make contact with one another any more, and perform the essential gestures, the ones that allow the human species to reproduce, the ones that also, sometimes, allow you to be happy?”
That “sometimes” is echt Houellebecq. We’re only on page 22 when we’re told that Paul “knew deep down that … [his wife’s] deepest being would always need sex, and in her case it was heterosexual sex, and even, if he had to be completely precise about it, penetration by a cock”. Wanting to ensure he can still maintain an erection in that event, he pays for an escort and ends up embarrassed in a way he doesn’t predict; more reader-goading storylines involve Paul’s brother, a restorer of medieval tapestries, who falls for their dad’s nurse, from Benin. Meanwhile, as Houellebecq might say, the cyber-attacks continue: targets include a Danish sperm bank and a Donegal firm developing military AI, both of which have repercussions for the French election campaign thrumming away in the background.
When Paul, ill with mouth cancer, finally gets back into bed with his wife – another of Houellebecq’s saviours of his woebegone males – we’re told: “It was an ideal and perfect way of life that didn’t cost very much. Now they had finished paying off their apartment, Prudence having a part-time job would broadly have covered it.” The way the novel keeps drilling down remorselessly into desire and aspiration as a matter of sex and shelter can’t help but be funny, and after all these years there’s still a tang to Houellebecq’s bluntness, for good and ill. When the unexpectedly emotional denouement sees Paul decide that he’d rather die than cut out his tongue, I don’t think we need to squint too hard to see a symbol for the author himself.
• Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq (translated by Shaun Whiteside) is published by Picador (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
