A few months ago, the president of prestigious French publishing house Gallimard reported that Meta’s generative AI tool had refused requests to write in the distinctive style of Michel Houellebecq, France’s most famous living novelist. It was deemed too offensive and discriminatory.
Certainly, Houellebecq is known for his darkly satirical, mordantly comedic and unremittingly pessimistic portrayals of contemporary life. He has also been hailed as “the most important novelist to have been publishing not only in France but in all of Europe over the past three decades”, by David Sexton, writing in the Times.
Review: Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq (Picador)
He has spoken approvingly of Brexit and has praised Donald Trump as “one of the best American presidents” he’s ever seen.
Journalist Emily Eakin once pithily noted Houllebecq is “considered by turns a pornographer, a Stalinist, a racist, a sexist, a nihilist, a reactionary, a eugenicist and a homophobe”.
More recently, he has offhandedly dismissed the conflict in Ukraine. “At the start of the war, I was surprised because I thought Ukraine was Russian,” he confessed recently, in a characteristically boozy interview. In the same breath, he appeared to argue the West should withdraw its financial support for Ukraine:
It’s better for nature to take its course. People with humanitarian ideas are a catastrophe. It doesn’t work, and the motivations are doubtful.
While in most Western countries, a writer who says the things Houllebecq does would surely be censured, if not cancelled, in France, he is considered – for better or worse – a public intellectual.
French novelist Emmanuel Carrère, argues that Houellebecq “has a unique historical vision and a unique ability to think ‘out of the box.’” This paradoxical situation raises uncomfortable questions about the values that France champions, chiefly its fierce protection of intellectual freedom, even for voices that provoke and offend.
Houellebecq’s eighth and apparently final novel, Annihilation (Anéantir), published in French in 2022, has just been released in English.
It charts the disillusionment and physical decline of a wholly unexceptional government official, and includes politician characters clearly based on French president Emmanuel Macron and members of his government. Despite featuring acts of occult terrorism and an instance of incest, Houellebecq has described it as a “sentimental” book.
A bête noire of the literary establishment and many on the left, Houellebecq has faced sustained criticism for endorsing misogyny, promoting Islamophobia and, more recently, for allegedly advocating far-right extremism.
At the same time, he is feted in conservative circles not only as a champion of free speech but as a kind of prophet. His grim vision of the modern world and willingness to say the unsayable resonates with those wary of the perceived threats posed by political correctness – and anxious about implications of social and cultural progressivism.
Shaped by abandonment
Houellebecq was born on the French island of Réunion in 1956. Abandoned by his parents at an early age, Houellebecq lived for several years with his maternal grandparents in Algeria and later with his paternal grandmother in France. He trained to be an agricultural engineer and worked as a civil servant before rocketing to literary stardom in the late 1990s. These experiences have shaped Houellebecq’s outlook and approach to writing.
He has garnered numerous literary accolades, including the prestigious Prix Goncourt, awarded to him in 2010 for his novel The Map and the Territory (La Carte et le Territoire). In 2019, President Macron presented Houellebecq with the Legion of Honour in recognition of his significant contribution to French literature.
A perennial Nobel Prize in Literature contender, Houellebecq is also easily the most controversial and divisive author of his generation. His sexually explicit, voyeuristic and sometimes shockingly violent bestsellers explore themes of alienation, the commodification of human relationships in the era of late capitalism, and the erosion of traditional social principles, sparking intense debate.
His 2015 novel Submission (Soumission), which imagines a near-future France under Islamic rule, was published on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, further adding to the notoriety surrounding his work. Critics took him to task for what they saw as a cynical, reactionary vision of the future. But supporters viewed the book as an astute – if unsettling – reflection on the tensions between secularism and Islam in French society.
Whatever one thinks of Houellebecq, one thing is indisputable: his work resonates with readers. Atomised (Les Particules élémentaires) (1998), his most renowned novel, sold 250,000 copies in France within just three months. It tells the tale of two half-brothers, raised apart and living vastly different lives, who symbolise the collapse of personal and civil bonds as the 20th century splutters to an uneasy and – in Houellebecq’s withering estimation – deeply disappointing close.
Political and personal intrigue in 2027
These preoccupations are at the forefront of Annihilation. Translated by Shaun Whiteside, Houellebecq’s world-weary tome (of over 500 pages) unfolds against a familiar backdrop of personal illness, collective malaise and political intrigue. Set in 2027, the narrative revolves around a character named Paul Raison.
Closing in on 50, Paul is a typical Houellebecq antihero. Emotionally jaded, disenchanted and trapped in what appears to be a loveless marriage with his wife Prudence, Paul works as an advisor to Bruno Jorge, Minister of the Economy and Finance. Jorge is based on Bruno Le Maire, a real-life politician and former diplomat, who just so happens to be friends with Houellebecq.
Jorge reports to a long-serving president with Putinesque ambitions to cling to power. Up for reelection at the start of the novel, this president, who is never referred to by name, is clearly modelled on Macron. In an uncanny twist that, like it or not, highlights Houellebecq’s prescience, the incumbent president finds himself locked in a battle against Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party, which performs strongly in the first round of national voting.
Adding to the chaos, the government and the DGSI (France’s internal security agency) are grappling with a series of elaborate and increasingly ominous cyberattacks. Ultra-leftists. Religious fanatics. White supremacists. Eco-fascists. Fingers of suspicion begin to wag, but nobody can agree on who might be behind it all.
Those in power are certain of just one thing: “the means of attack were advancing faster than the means of defence; the order and security of the world were going to become increasingly difficult to guarantee”.
If that’s not enough to contend with, Paul’s family is in the process of unravelling. His father, Édouard, used to be employed by the DGSI – and has been conducting his own research into the digital attacks currently rocking the country. Early in the novel, he suffers a serious stroke. In response, Paul, his wife and his younger siblings (Cécile and Aurélien) gather at the Raison family home in the French countryside to decide how best to care for the ailing Édouard. Things go from bad to worse.
At this point, as Roy Doyle observes in a largely hostile review for the New Statesman, Houellebecq’s novel “becomes an analysis of France’s cultural and political fault-lines through the lens of a single bourgeois family”.
Against liberalism
While Houellebecq hits many familiar marks, he adds a few new ones. Migrants and mainstream politicians take a critical beating. Asexuals catch some flak, as do vegans, who he castigates as purveyors of “total nutritional warfare”. Children come in for a fair bit of criticism too. “After destroying its parents as a couple,” Houellebecq argues,
the child sets about destroying them individually, its chief preoccupation being to wait for their death so that it can inherit its legacy, as clearly established in the French realist literature of the nineteenth century.
Houellebecq leaves the reader in no doubt about his take on things, with his conservative credentials firmly on display. He is extremely disdainful of those who cling to the notion that liberalism can address the challenges of contemporary society:
The liberal doxa persisted in ignoring the problem, in the naive belief that the lure of material gain could be substituted for any other human motivation […] it seemed obvious to Paul that the whole system was going to come crashing down, even if one could not at present predict the date or the manner in which this might occur – but the date could be close, and the manner violent.
Whether you agree with this sort of assertion is probably going to determine your response to Annihilation. Houellebecq, who is reportedly in poor health (which perhaps explains his preoccupation with the topics of faith, euthanasia and assisted suicide), is unlikely to win over any new converts with this novel. I suspect he really doesn’t care. But it strikes me as unwise to dismiss him or his work outright. His message, however unpalatable and confronting, resonates deeply with a significant readership.
Odious but often unexpectedly funny, Houellebecq’s new novel is, for my money, probably the best thing he’s written – especially in its final stages, where things take a radical and strangely moving turn.
Will Houllebecq’s bleak vision of the near future come to pass? Only time will tell. That said, the signs aren’t very promising. As he says towards the end of Annihilation:
Victory for the National Rally was inconceivable, but it had been inconceivable for fifty years, and sometimes inconceivable things did happen. The gap between the ruling classes and the population had reached unheard-of levels in small provincial towns […] racial hatred was soaring in Europe, and that wasn’t going to be sorted out anytime soon.
Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
