French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s last novel, 2019’s Serotonin, practically dared the reader to abandon it. Bitter, bigoted narrator Florent-Claude Labrouste sprayed venom in all directions, but reserved the worst for his near-silent, spectacularly unfaithful Japanese wife – a woman whose infidelities extended not only to entire roomfuls of men, but at one point to a roomful of dogs.
Repugnant though much of this material was, Houellebecq dredged from the sewage a novel of unexpected poignancy. Burning off its fury in the heat of its first half, Serotonin evolved in its closing passages into a work of elegiac, alienated grief, albeit one that retained, in its daring psychological excavation of the then-nascent gilets jaunes movement, Houellebecq’s sharp eye for contemporary cultural fissures.
Houellebecq’s latest (and, he claims, final) novel seems to emerge from Serotonin’s emotive aftermath. Largely purged of the provocation and gleeful unpleasantness of his earlier work, Annihilation feels instead suffused with a particular kind of sadness – overwhelming, numbing, at times deliberately and maddeningly boring.
Like Serotonin’s narrator, French government minister Paul Raison has grown distant from his wife. Inside their fridge, “total nutritional warfare” is under way. Prudence has converted to veganism. Amid her tofu and quinoa, Paul finds “nothing but shit to eat”. Ultimately, an uneasy compromise is reached: a designated shelf for his “redneck food”. Paul’s emotional response to this schism differs significantly from Labrouste’s chauvinistic resentment. Sorrow, not cruelty, is the keynote here. Paul and Prudence exist day to day in a state of “standardised despair”. The warfare is confined to the refrigerator.
Throughout Annihilation, similar dualities of stasis and chaos, violence and sexless bureaucracy, demarcate its psychosocial terrain. At a Paris Metro station, the disordered subversion of graffiti slogans clashes with the “witless nonsense” of a state-sponsored public poetry initiative. In drab governmental offices, politicians of the old order recruit slovenly, irreverent youngsters to decode a series of increasingly sinister online attacks. And across France, as 2027 begins and an election gets under way, the placid familiarity of the incumbent liberal regime is set against the chaos element of the populist right. At every level, the binary is a dispiriting one: disorder precariously held at bay by precisely the airless stagnation that inspires it.
Annihilation is a lengthy novel, and Houellebecq labours to make it feel longer. The colour palette is overwhelmingly grey; tension is almost superstitiously avoided. Paul’s mournful acceptance of life’s cruelties leaves the book feeling at times as if the despair of his marriage has saturated every aspect, including Houellebecq’s wilfully textureless run-on sentences.
Like most of Houellebecq’s work, though, the book sharpens as it advances. Annihilation may present itself as a political thriller, but at its heart is a far more intimate catastrophe: the debilitating, near fatal stroke suffered by Paul’s father, and the decline of his once empathetic care facility into a neoliberal nightmare of cost savings and creeping neglect. Viewed through the eyes of Maryse, a care assistant and migrant worker, Houellebecq’s vision of old age in a society that sees “the value of a human being declining as their age increases”, is at once hellish and viscerally accurate:
The residents who weren’t able to get out of bed all had terrifying bed sores. She had ten minutes to wash them, which wasn’t nearly enough, and lots of them couldn’t go to the toilet themselves … sometimes when she came back the little old man in question wouldn’t have been able to hold it in, he would have shat on himself and on the floor, and she had to clean it all up.
Such is Houellebecq’s insufferably bleak vision of progress. “By granting greater value to the life of a child,” says the leader of a rightwing activist group committed to liberating the infirm from their care homes, we “deprive life of all motivation and meaning”. Aimless and empty, we strive to replace purpose with comfort, only for comfort to further drain our purpose. “An improvement in living conditions,” as Houellebecq says, “often goes hand in hand with a deterioration of reasons for living.” Our future is simply concentric circles of decline: first the body fails, then the system that supports it disintegrates.
In a collective life uncoupled from meaning, politics can hold no meaning either. As the election gathers pace, and as the virtual threats evolve inevitably into real-world terrorist violence, the stifling ennui of Annihilation’s first half comes to feel perfectly arranged. “You can never really imagine,” says Houellebecq, “how trifling most people’s lives are, and you can’t even do it when you’re one of those ‘people’ yourself.” Political events, shifts in the global order, are merely passing flickers of activity in a fundamentally anaesthetised collective consciousness. Houellebecq makes no clear case, here, for populist rightwing politics, or for some liberating upheaval of the socioeconomic status quo. What fascinates him instead is the yawning void that politics, with its illusion of activity and change, both obscures and fails to fill – a vision of political reality that few self-consciously “political” novels, which depend on surface activity for their effect, manage to achieve.
And yet, Annihilation resists the temptations of nihilism and solipsism. Houellebecq may see a great deal of death in life, but he locates in the proximity of death much of the life he finds absent elsewhere. Paul’s slow reconciliation with Prudence, progressing from shared walks to tentative touch, feels deeply sincere, as does Paul’s realisation that his father, who now communicates solely through blinking, retains a profound intellectual curiosity, and through his devoted relationship with his partner, a life of ongoing emotional fulfilment.
Inevitably, Paul must confront the horror of his own finality. When he does so, the bodily reality – anatomised through a clinical gaze – is brutal, but the mind within becomes calm. In the end, Annihilation leans neither towards hope nor despair, but towards a transcendent serenity – an eerie peace that arises, as everything arises in this novel, in the space to which warring forces give shape.
• 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.
