A novel by Michel Houellebecq isn’t just a literary event; it’s news. I can’t think of any other French novelist who’s a must-read here; in fact I can’t think of a contemporary novelist anywhere whose work reflects the mood of the times so acutely he seems to anticipate events; or any other writer who is so willing to show us the world as he sees it, not as we’d like it to be. Submission, his fantasy of a France with an Islamist government, came out on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attacks; Sérotonine anticipated the yellow vests rural riots. And annihilation, when it was published in France in 2022 — there was an odd delay in bringing out the English translation by Shaun Whiteside — was seen as domestic story, a family caring for a father suffering a stroke. But being Houellebecq, that’s not the half of it.
The protagonist is Paul, a high flying civil servant and special adviser to the genius finance minister, Bruno Juge, who’s about to be made a candidate for even higher office. It’s a bid to keep the seat warm for a return to the presidency by Emmanuel Macron, though he’s never named. He’ll have to see off the challenge of an insurgent National Rally, with its young and personable candidate for premier. It is set in 2027 but it pretty well describes the recent French general election. Solene Signal, the campaign director, an Alistair Campbell-cum-Morgan McSweeney figure, is especially good. But the comparisons aren’t exact; Bruno gets to declaim Corneille when he’s working on his vocal delivery, which wouldn’t happen here.
Paul is married to another high-flier, Prudence, and they barely cohabit; their mutual alienation is evident in the separate shelves in the fridge. Prudence, who has discovered Celtic spirituality and veganism, won’t let Paul’s charcuterie near her peculiar foodstuffs. Here is the middle class malaise of relations between the sexes: barely talking, rarely copulating and certainly not procreating.
Except then Paul’s father, a former intelligence bigwig, is struck down by a stroke and their relationship changes; her father too becomes ill, and the pair must address their responsibilities as children. And so do Paul’s siblings. His sister is a new-wave Catholic; his brother gets fleeting respite from his hellish marriage in an affair with his father’s nurse, a woman from Benin where they treat the old differently. All rally round the father, immobile except for an expressive eye and another working part. The drama of the hospital-care home where patients flourish under a humane director and get bedsores when he is displaced is gripping; so is the denouement. Houellebecq doesn’t care for assisted dying; his aspiration is assisted living.
Being Houellebecq, there’s filth
And being Houellebecq, there’s filth. Prudence is in her fifties, but still hot in hotpants, which makes a change from the author’s normal brusque approach to women who are getting on a bit. The pair come together; this is nothing short of a love story. There are, inevitably, precise descriptions of fellatio, and on one occasion it is administered by the narrator’s niece, whom he fails to recognise during a visit to a prostitute. Ho hum.
And, being Houellebecq, he can identify the underlying cause of the malaise: the French Revolution, the inanities of Rousseau, the malign genius of Voltaire. It’s one thing to criticise the Revolution; Houellebecq can describe those particularly horrible parts of it in which aristos’ female body parts were sported by the revolutionaries. Eew.
Over all this, there’s a sensational threat to global security: an unknown enemy who strikes at Chinese container shipping; at a Danish sperm bank; a remote factory in Ireland making computer-human hybrids, a migrant boat, an island equivalent of Davos. There’s method in the madness; all the targets represent issues that Houellebecq feels strongly about. The narrator reflects: “Basically he didn’t object to the destruction of the sperm bank. The idea of buying sperm and more generally of launching oneself into a reproductive project that didn’t even have the excuse of sexual desire or love … even struck him as frankly revolting.” Annihilation here is both individual and collective: “if the terrorists’ goal was to annihilate the modern world, he couldn’t entirely blame them.” However, it turns out that Paul’s dad had anticipated this turn of events in his old job; and his old box of papers turns out to be very handy. But having enticed the reader up the garden path with this exciting narrative, our author leaves him simply leaves there.
There are other flaws, not least some ill advised dream sequences and the narrator’s apparent embrace of reincarnation — really? — but Houellebecq is so generous with his plots and sub plots, the personal and the political, adventure and tragedy, it would be churlish to quibble. He finishes ominously: “it’s time for me to stop”. Don’t stop. Please.
