Michel Houellebecq’s material hell

Has the laureate of Western decline found his spiritual redemption?

By Rob Doyle

In a text first published in 1991 and translated into English as “To Stay Alive”, Michel Houellebecq offered self-help advice to aspiring writers. Some of it was general: “Develop in yourself a profound resentment toward life… Ruin your life, but not by much… Be abject, and you will be true… When you provoke in others a mixture of horrified pity and contempt, you will know that you are on the right track.” Other tips were playbook-practical: “The mechanisms of the welfare state (unemployment payments, etc.) should be taken full advantage of… In a general way, you will be tossed back and forth between bitterness and anguish. In both cases, alcohol will help.”

When he wrote “To Stay Alive”, Houellebecq was still an obscure poet and civil servant, a few years away from his celebrity as Europe’s most controversial living novelist. But now Annihilation, his latest and longest novel, includes an acknowledgements page whose final words are, “By chance I have reached a positive conclusion: it’s time for me to stop.” If this really is la fin de Houellebecq, (he has since implied there may be more to come) he’s had a remarkably long run as object of cultural fascination. The epigraph to his 2010 novel, The Map and the Territory, in which the author included (and eviscerated) himself as a character, read: “The world is weary of me, and I am weary of it.” But that novel won its author the Prix Goncourt, making official Houellebecq’s acceptance by the French literary establishment. The world was not weary of him, and it was even less so five years later, with the publication of his novel of an Islamised France, Submission. I was living in Paris at the time and, published with dire serendipity on the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the novel was everywhere.

But as we drift through the doldrums of the 2020s, with Houellebecq pushing 70, it seems the world finally is tiring of him. His previous novel, Serotonin, had already given distinct signs that he had said all he had to say and was settling into a karaoke singalong of his own greatest hits. The unusually long wait — almost three years — for Anéantir to arrive, in a translation by Shaun Whiteside as Annihilation, is itself telling. First-wave reviews in the French and Anglophone presses indicated a consensus of disappointment. While Houellebecq has lately become a meme-icon to post-alt-right/dirtbag-left jokers of neoliberal desperation — the likes of the Instagrammer @houellebecqcellectuals — wider Michel-mania has been and gone.

Annihilation is disappointing — overlong, enervated, often clumsy, intellectually crude. It’s the only Houellebecq book I doubt I’ll ever reread, and the only one that, had I not been reading it for review, I might not have bothered to finish. That would have been a mistake — the novel ends on a sustained passage of stark, elegiac beauty, as a principle character, suddenly stricken by terminal illness, drifts towards his death. For these 80 or so pages, we find Houellebecq at his most tender, sad, and desperately moving — qualities which have always been there, at times drowned out by the shock and rage, the hatred and provocation, but never so unforgettably as in his axis-shifting masterwork, Atomised. Preceding that bleakly beautiful coda, though, stretches a loose weave of only sporadically gripping storylines that never satisfyingly resolve: a French political thriller (where once he was predictive, here Houellebecq reads like a mere reporter); a Franzenesque but pedestrian family drama of illness and palliative care; and an overarching terrorism plot involving massive cyberattacks, CGI-generated snuff films, the occult deity Baphomet (we even get an illustration, one of several in the novel), and torpedo attacks in international shipping lanes.

The year is 2027, and our protagonist is Paul Raison (note the surname, and recall that Houellebecq is no stranger to symbolically resonant nomenclature — in Submission, the jaded, spineless Frenchman who embraces Islam was named François). A mediocre, barely distinctive man in his late forties, Paul is an advisor to Bruno Jorge, Minister of the Economy and Finance, and son to Édouard, a former operative for the DGSI (France’s internal security agency). When the elderly Édouard suffers a stroke, Paul, his wife Prudence, and his siblings convene at the family home in the French countryside to meet the crisis. The novel becomes an analysis of France’s cultural and political fault-lines through the lens of a single bourgeois family. Classic Houellebecq tropes make their faded, heard-it-all-before appearances: the abandoning, bohemian mother; the vengeful and sexually stingy woman; the shattered and asexual male. Paul’s sister Cécile and her husband Hervé are more intriguing: a devoutly Catholic, traditionalist couple who, while displaying considerable moral integrity, vote for Le Pen and adore the Lord of the Rings films as allegories of white, Judaeo-Christian struggle against the Mordor-Muslim hordes (“I bid you stand, Men of the West!”). Paul and Cécile’s docile brother Aurélien is married to a poisonous, career-driven but failed journalist, Indy, whom Paul suspects of having adopted a black baby to deliberately humiliate her sterile husband (in my proof copy, the word “black” was piously but inconsistently capitalised — how laughably inapt to the tone and spirit of Houellebecq!).

This soap operatic middle-section culminates in a semi-farcical, paramilitary-style rescue operation, whereby the Raisons and their nativist accomplices bust Édouard out of hospital. The set-piece is clearly intended to ram home some sort of polemical point — euthanasia is wrong? is right? — but what exactly this is never quite becomes clear… or perhaps it does, but we’ve zoned out and no longer care what Houellebecq is so laboriously getting at. Recycled rhetoric about how our civilisation hates the elderly underscores the novel’s basic, fatal problem. What was apparent in Serotonin — and even in Submission, though there it was softened by a fascinating political premise — in Annihilation becomes glaring and oppressive. Everything that happens in late-period Houellebecq is an echo of something that happened, with far greater force and moral challenge, in an earlier novel. Take Aurélien’s memories of the bullying he endured as a schoolboy:

“It usually happened very quickly, a desperate run along the school corridors, some vain pleading, then they brought him to their leader, a big, stout, Black boy, at least a hundred kilos of fat and muscle, whom they called ‘The Monster’. Then they forced him to kneel down, and he could see in his mind the happy, almost cordial, smile of The Monster as he opened his fly to piss on his face, he tried to break away, but the others were holding on to him tightly, and he remembered the smell of his bitter piss.”

Not bad in quotation — but, appearing amid five-hundred complacently written pages, it has none of the scarring impact of the scene it recalls from Atomised, in which eleven-year-old Bruno is set upon by a pack of his boarding-school peers:

“They push him to the ground, grab his feet and drag him across the floor to the toilets. They rip off his pyjama bottoms. His penis is hairless, still that of a child. Two of them hold him by the ankles while others force his mouth open. Pelé takes a toilet brush and scrubs Bruno’s face. He can taste shit. He screams.”

What once raged with cyclonic force has degraded into mannerism and the repetition of formulae — the irony being that such attenuation is an effect of the same processes of ageing and decline of which Houellebecq has been so ruthless an observer. When a writer’s wrists begin to creak, the sorcery risks exposure as mere sleight of hand. Our sympathy for a universal affliction is strained by our impatience as readers.

Sexlessness, even more of an obsession for Houellebecq than sex, has by now come to seem a tired metaphor with which he can keep trumpeting his long-received, loud-and-clear message of civilisational suicide. Of Paul, we are told that “for ten years he had not fucked, let alone made love with Prudence, or indeed with anyone else”. Elsewhere: “More and more people were asexual, all the surveys confirmed as much.” This late in the day, such insistence reads like an authorial auto-consolation for the sadness of undesired, ageing flesh: cheer up, old boy, nobody is getting any.

There are further shortcomings: flimsy plotting; lazy, inelegant sentences; hollow characters too obviously serving as cyphers of human frailty and abjection, or as mouthpieces for the author’s own philosophical attitudes. But these flaws are nothing new in Houellebecq — to his detractors, they’ve long been the tell-tale signs of his inferiority, whereas to his admirers, they’re an easy price to pay for a fiercely original imagination bent on eviscerating liberal hypocrisy. In a late work so drained of power, though, Houellebecq’s weaknesses cannot justify themselves as part of a wider aesthetic-polemical economy. He has always been less a novelist in the canonical, Anglophone sense, than a fictively armed, jihadi-propagandist for a particular way of seeing the world. With the rhetoric grown overfamiliar, the polemic feels merely hectoring and insultingly crude.

But now Houellebecq, no doubt sensing the impasse, appears to be calling time on himself. I’m not about to plead for an encore. But to those of us who have long found a morbid kind of solace in his work, this novelist who has given so much ought not, at the end of his long service, be dispatched with a volley of hatchet blows. And in truth, even when he’s bad, he’s never entirely without interest. What’s especially intriguing in Annihilation is an element that’s always been there, coming through in glimpses, throughout Houellebecq’s oeuvre. While his books are a brutal reckoning with what becomes of human beings in a society whose reigning philosophies deny them any hope of transcendental consolation, Houellebecq has evinced no little curiosity about just such a dimension. For a decade, he’s been tacitly inviting us to regard him as a Christian-conservative writer in the grand French lineage of Blaise Pascal, Joseph de Maistre, and the later J.K. Huysmans. On reading Serotonin, I’d wondered if I was alone in seeing in its strange final paragraph a shock twist that prompted a retroactive interpretation of the novel as a modern-day crucifixion narrative. (“Must I, on top of everything, give my life for these wretches?”)

In Annihilation, dreams — those universal conduits to the numinous — are given page after page to unfurl in unprecedented detail. The impression is of late-period Houellebecq paying closer regard than ever before to the depths of reality that lie beneath his depressive, reductive realism. A half-submerged mysticism is felt too in lengthy quotations from real-life books about near-death experiences, and in Paul’s wife Prudence’s never-ridiculed adherence to the Wiccan pagan belief-system. And why, exactly, does the author offer us, in the novel’s dying pages, an achingly beautiful, Hindu-Buddhistic evocation of two lovers repeatedly finding each other across “successive incarnations, perhaps dozens of them, before they could leave the cycle of samsaric existence to pass to the other shore, that of illumination, of timeless fusion with the soul of the world, of nirvana”?

Usually it’s crude to assume that a fictional character’s opinions reflect that of their author, but the rule can be relaxed with the tactically uncouth Houellebecq. When Paul-whose-surname-means-Reason visits the church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Nativité and lights two candles, he ruminates on how “his atheism as a matter of principle was fragile, since it was unable to rely on a consistent ontology. Was the world material? It was a hypothesis, but as far as he knew the world might just as well be made up of spiritual entities; he no longer knew what science actually meant by ‘matter’…”

More than a century ago, in his clarion call for non-figurative painting, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Wassily Kandinsky confidently declared that humankind was awakening from the “enduring nightmare” of the “materialistic worldview” to triumphantly enter the “final hour of the spiritual revolution”. Rather than any such apotheosis, what followed was world wars, mass extermination, nuclear atrocity, and a 20th century in which the 19th’s materialist dogmas became ever more deeply entrenched. Michel Houellebecq once wondered whether all he has done as a writer has been, like his beloved H.P. Lovecraft, to fashion “materialist horror stories” from the chaos of the world that came to disappoint Kandinsky’s vision. And that is what his novels are — from one perspective. The afore-quoted passages, and others like them, tempt us to wonder if, all along, Houellebecq was really writing, or at least longed to write, an entirely different kind of story.