A Meditation on Michel Houellebecq and His Purportedly Terminal Novel

‘I don't believe for a half-second... that “nothing will be like it was before”. We will not wake up after the lockdown in a new world. It will be the same, just a bit worse.'—Michel Houellebecq, 2020

Works of Cultural Hygiene

[This article may be too long for the Substack newsletter format. If you’re reading it as an email and it tails off unexpectedly, please click on the headline at the top of the page to be taken to the full post at Substack.]

'We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we’ve lived there, whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters. The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our companion between two infinities of happiness and peace.' — Michel Houellebecq, Serotonin

When the French novelist, Michel Houellebecq, first exploded on to the literary scene with his second novel, Atomised, in the late 1990s, he came across as the frenzied, forensic but above all fearless warrior of social and cultural truth, a goblinesque weirdo who, unlike all other novelists, seemed more interested in denouncing the modern world than in winning prizes or influencing the influential. That book, an unrelenting narrative-rant against post-1960s cultural reality, drew him grudging attention and no little admiration. Those who doubled back to read his debut novel, Whatever, from 1994, were confronted by a strange story of a Parisian computer programmer who would in time reveal himself as the prototype for a recurring Houellebecquean archetype: lonely, sexless, underachieving, depressed and male.

On the cover of at least one edition of that first book was a picture of a cow, denoting two different themes: a plot involving the protagonist’s current assignment of training-in workers at the Ministry of Agriculture in the use of a new computer programme, and also his hobby of writing stories about animals, some of which are reproduced in the novel. In a startling episode which more or less defines Houellebecq’s attitude to plot, the protagonist tries to persuade a colleague that he ought to murder a woman who has rejected him; the colleague chickens out and shortly afterwards is himself killed in a car accident. Whatever is largely the story of sexual pratfall and misadventure. The book sketches analogies between the failures of the free market and the post-1960s sexual liberation, in both instances the spoils going to the fittest, leaving the unfit with the leftovers. A book that almost nobody read at the time, it offered retrospective confirmation of a strange and disturbing voice having entered the culture as a kind of a cuckoo in the literary nest.

In time, a Houellebecquean legend emerged of an ageless man — literally a man who did not know his own age, being unsure as to whether he was born in 1956 or 1958. The child of a broken marriage of liberal libertines, reared by his grandmother, whose maiden name he adopted as his now infamous pen name, he has become a kind of post-modern whistleblower who both rendered incarnate and culturally exposed the nakedness of the late-twentieth century world and its postmodern notions. He wrote splenetically and with equal vehemence of feminism, wokeness, environmentalism, multiculturalism, and Islam. (I read someplace that his French publisher, Gallimard, recently complained that Meta’s A.I. tool, Llama, refused to write a scene in the style of Houellebecq, offering instead to write something ‘respectful and inclusive.’) A peevish observer might fairly accurately declare that Houellebecq has supplanted Flannery O;Connor’s dictum concerning the dual novelistic prerequisite concerns — ‘mystery and manners’ — with the dyad ‘misery and misanthropy’; and yet his books are just as revolutionary in their time as O’Connor’s were in hers, chiefly as a consequence of their dark-laughter induction and frankness. Even many of those who abominate what they call his ‘worldview’ concede that he is the most iconic novelist since Beckett.

He is a religious agnostic who believes in belief. He declares that the Great Replacement is ‘not a theory, but a fact’. He decided many years ago that France and the world were ‘lost’. Houellebecq has for a quarter of a century been the writer outside the awards ceremony wearing the placard declaring ‘The End is Nigh’ — and not just the end of literature, but the end of a world which had lost its compass, which, stuck in a false, mechanistic and individualistic view of humanity, is moving towards disaster. Very often, it’s as if society is trailing after his ‘prophecies’ such as his novelistic premonitions of both incels and the gilets jaunes. His critiques of capitalism and neoliberalism have provided insurance against the ultimate adhesiveness to his forehead of the ‘far right’ label, since these render him, almost uniquely, as acceptable to the Left as to the Right.

To begin with, he was not the most elegant of writers, but in time he developed a lolloping stream-of-consciousness style that became recognisable in its weird dissonant musicality. He was, in some ways, more of an existential rock journalist than a novelist per se. In his 2011 book The Map and the Territory, he developed a character, ‘Michel Houellebecq’, a fiction-writer, whose home contains mainly books by social reformers of the nineteenth century — Marx, Proudhon, Owen, Carlyle, and others. His exhibited from the beginning a raw and magpie intelligence, which crossed the lines of interdisciplinary territorialism to place the world in his books as a conglomeration of physics, economics, religion, poetry, hedonism, agriculture, rock ’n’ roll, and much more besides. Practitioners of all of these disciplines nitpicked his knowledge, his style and his insights, but no one was able to match the verisimilitude he attained by mixing these elements to create a Polaroid of the world as it was.

In a 2019 review for First Things, the American magazine of ‘religion in the public square’, of his (now, we gather, penultimate) novel, Serotonin, I wrote:

Houellebecq does not read as a natural or even comfortable novelist, but as someone who has invaded an increasingly redundant form to say things incapable of being heard otherwise. He does not write recreational yarns, nor book-shaped sedatives. A kind of investigative reporter who reports truths rather than facts, he is a red-pilled Hunter S. Thompson in reverse gear, the chief scribe of the counter-counterculture, the Great Gonzo of Truth-telling, the one prepared to describe the depths of degradation and hopelessness to which libertinism and nihilism have dragged us. His books are documents of an internal forensics of human decline that happen to take the form of stories.

Three decades after the publication of his first book, Monsieur Houellebecq has published what he insists will be his last: Annihilation, his ninth. Released in the French edition in January 2022, it has mysteriously taken almost three years to appear in English. It is his longest novel to date — over 500 pages in the English edition and 734 in the French (according to one reviewer writing in 2022). Between Atomised and Annihilation are six novels of varying levels of commercial and critical impact. Each of them, in its way, has laid bare the duplicities and contradictions of contemporary liberalism, albeit in its preliminary stages, sliding in where other writers — of every hue — have feared to tread.

For many years, he has been treated by reviewers as a separate literary category. Due to his escalating popularity, they could not entirely ignore him (that, though he may not yet understand this, would probably not be true had he sought to emerge in the post-2020 moment), and yet they condescended to him as the ‘far right novelist’ or ‘punk prophet’. He attracted as much formal disfavour as popular approval, however, on one occasion getting himself prosecuted for ‘hate speech’ (he was acquitted at trial) and in 2015 was roundly pilloried having published a novel, Submission, which satirically depicted France in 2022 electing a Muslim president and introducing Sharia law. In one of those strange Houellebecquean episodes, the book was published on January 7th, 2015, the day that jihadists attacked the Paris offices of the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, in which twelve people were killed. The latest edition of the magazine had just appeared on the newsstands, with a picture of Houellebecq, in mock magician costume, on the cover.

He refuses the role of prophet, however, stressing that, counter to the current literary convention, his role is to articulate the fears of his times. In one interview he declared: ‘The writer — me, Orwell, or someone else — feels an anxiety in his contemporaries and he expresses it in a book. That’s what drives the process.’ He makes no attempt to justify himself as a writer qua writer, citing Arthur Schopenhauer’s observation that ‘the first — and practically the only — condition of good style is having something to say.’

Coming to the end, he is attracting the recognition he deserves. The jacket of the just-published English translation of Annihilation contains lines that I swear I uttered or wrote of Houellebecq more than twenty years ago:

‘We have no one to match Houellebecq’ — The Daily Telegraph

‘The most interesting novelist of our time’ — (London) Evening Standard

‘The most important novelist, in all of Europe, of the past three decades. — The Sunday Times

A ‘banal’ virus

In the late spring of 2020 (late April, probably), just a few weeks into the Covid coup, Michel Houellebecq wrote a short essay for broadcast on a French national radio station, ‘A Bit Worse: Responses to Some Friends’, in which he outlined some of his reactions to what was happening in the world. The cherry-picking style of the media treatment of this essay gave the impression that he was dissing the significance of what was happening, i.e. of the ‘virus’ qua virus. But a more thorough reading of the essay suggests something more subtle.

The headlines reported — accurately — his declaration that ‘the world would be just the same after the coronavirus — ‘only worse.’ They also recorded his elaboration: ‘I do not believe for a half-second the declarations that “nothing will be like it was before”. The way this epidemic has panned out is remarkably normal.’

The media also reported him describing ‘COVID-19’ as ‘a banal virus with no redeeming qualities ... It's not even sexually transmitted.’

This has remained, as far as the public record shows, his sole (certainly his clearest) public response to the ‘pandemic’.

The essay itself,which is reproduced in Interventions 2020, a volume of his articles and essays, implies a more complex response.

Precisely, he was responding to the comments of other writers who had made several points about the effects of the lockdowns on writing — of ‘solitary confinement’, the possibility of the overall episode ‘inspiring interesting books,‘ et cetera. He was also answering back to certain leftist French voices predicting that the ‘pandemic’ might result in an altered political culture. Uncharacteristically, he appears to have missed that, in short order, the Left would fall in behind the scam in the reasonable expectation that it would deliver on some of their wildest lefty dreams.

While it is clear that — at that stage anyway — he was a believer in ‘the virus’, even ‘the coronavirus’ as he termed it, and the ‘epidemic’, (novelists tended not to see through the scam that Covid was from the beginning, perhaps because, their own game being the fabrication of reality, they tend to believe that everything that happens in the world is fully real) and was not speaking of any medical nor especially social context. He was really saying no more than that the prospect of the world being, at that moment, transformed by a ‘plague’ was a somewhat unlikely one:

Already I don’t believe for even half a second statements like ‘After this, nothing will ever be the same’. On the contrary, everything will remain exactly the same. The unfolding of this epidemic has been remarkably normal, even. The West will not be the richest and most developed zone in the world for all eternity, it’s not our divine right. Our story has been over for some time now, this isn’t exactly a scoop.

We therefore need to place his response in the broader context of his worldview as expressed (at that point) in eight novels since 1994, casting a dark obliqueness on the degradation and decline of human culture and — actually — humanness. In fact, in that essay, he went on to anticipate several of the downstream consequences of the moment he was speaking from:

[T]he principal result of the coronavirus has been to accelerate certain mutations that were already underway. For quite a few years now, technological evolutions, whether minor (video on demand, touch-free payment) or major (teleworking, internet shopping, social networking sites) have as their main consequence (or principal objective?) to diminish physical and, above all, human contact. The coronavirus epidemic offers a fantastic justification for a certain obsolescence that seems to affect human relations.

Here, it is clear that he is at least suspicious of the motivations behind the lockdown, of not of the nature of the ‘virus’. Further on, he touches on the manner in which the ‘pandemic’ had rendered manifest something that would, a couple of years later, become one of the core themes of Annihilation:

It would be no less false to claim that we’ve now rediscovered the tragic, death, finitude, etc. For over half a century now, the tendency — as Philippe Ariès has described so well — has been to hide death as much as possible. And never has death been so discreet as in these last few weeks. People die alone in hospital rooms or in retirement homes, and are immediately buried (or incinerated, which seems so in the spirit of these times), without inviting anyone… in secret. Dying without any witness, victims are then summed up in the statistical unity of daily death tolls. And there’s something strangely abstract about the fear that spreads through the population as this number increases.  

Not to mention another number that’s taken on importance in recent weeks: the age of the sick. Up to what age is it appropriate to keep resuscitating and caring for the elderly? 70, 75, 80? Apparently this depends on which part of the world you’re living in. In any case, never before have we communicated with such shameless cool the fact that not everyone’s life is worth the same. That after a certain age (70, 75, 80?), it’s a bit like you’re already dead.

Houellebecq is himself an implacable opponent of euthanasia, and seems to have taken this as the key moral from the Covid episode. It incenses him as almost nothing else does. It is, as noted, a key theme of Annihilation, and a subtext of its title.

‘The real reason for euthanasia, in fact,’ he has emanate from the mouth of a man, Brian, whom his main protagonist, Paul, is hiring to rescue his father from a plunger-happy ‘care-home’, in response to Paul’s question as to whether he is a Christian, ‘is that we can no longer stand old people, we don’t even want to know that they exist, and that’s why we park them away in specialized places away from the eyes of other human beings. Almost all people today see the value of a human being declining as their age increases; that the life of a young man, and even more of a child, is broadly of greater value than that of a very old person.’

This is a radical anthropological turnaround, Brian adds, which relates to the imminent obsolescence of humanity as useful participants in reality. Our work, deeds and thoughts are becoming more and more irrelevant and superfluous.

‘In all previous civilizations, the esteem, indeed the admiration, that a man could be given, what allowed people to judge his value, was the way in which he had effectively behaved throughout his life; even bourgeois honours were only granted on the basis of trust, provisionally; one had to earn them through a whole life of honesty. By granting greater value to the life of a child — when we have no idea what he will become, whether he will be intelligent or stupid, a genius, a criminal or a saint — we deny all value to our real actions. Our deeds, whether heroic or generous, all the things that we have managed to accomplish, the things we have made, our works, none of that has the slightest worth in the eyes of the world any longer — and, very soon, even in our own eyes. We thus deprive life of all motivation and meaning: very precisely, this is what may be called nihilism. Devaluing the past and the present in favour of times to come, devaluing the real and preferring a virtual reality located in a vague future, are symptoms of European nihilism more decisive than anything that Nietzsche could have come up with — in fact now we should really speak in terms of Western nihilism, or modern nihilism, and I'm far from sure that the Asian countries have been spared in the medium term. It is true that Nietzsche was unable to identify the phenomenon, which only really manifested itself after his death. So, in a word, no, I'm not Christian; I am even inclined to believe that it all began with Christianity, this tendency to become resigned to the present world, however unbearable it might be, as we wait for a saviour and a hypothetical future; the original sin of Christianity, in my eyes, is hope.’

In the light of hindsight, Houellebecq’s overall response to the Covid episode displayed, even at that early stage, a degree of naïveté, if not myopia — and yet it was, at the same time, prophetic, foreseeing precisely the escalation in cultural indifference, if not hostility, to the old, and the emergence of technological and psychological instruments to drive human beings out of one another’s company, into further isolation. He mistook only the nature and source of the mortality he was describing — attributing it, I sense, to pragmatic triage, without appearing to realise that it was no kind of naturalistic or spontaneous phenomenon — the consequence of an organic virus, for example — but an orchestrated pornography, based on premeditated murder — democide — designed to instill a shared terror in a constructed mob, for precisely the purpose of ensuring that the world would never be the same again.

The Inside Job

I finished reading Annihilation last week in Malaga airport, and am torn between responses. The first — bafflement, which accompanied me through most of the first half — has not entirely abated, but is accompanied now by a much stronger sense of admiration and respect for Michel Houellebecq.

This is a book of two halves. In the first, the author sets out three parallel plotlines. Foremost is the family-centred story of a man, approaching 70, struck down by a stroke, comatose and without much hope of regaining his faculties. Actually, for a long time this seems to be just a ‘human-interest’ diversion from what suggests itself as the dominant strand of the book — being a double-edged blade of terrorism and political ambition: on the one hand an escalating series of guerilla-style internet stunts involving videos of actual attacks on a container ship, a sperm-bank and the conservative candidate in the upcoming 2027 French presidential election, the finance minister, Bruno Juge, whose political ambitions are central to the other strand. Paul Raison, who will emerge as the chief protagonist, consciousness and chief narrator of the book, works with/for Bruno as part of the French cabinet. It is Paul’s father, Édouard, a former French intelligence service agent, who has suffered the stroke, and whose family increasingly moves centre-stage as the book progresses — a perhaps ‘typical’ bourgeois family of dissociated siblings, bellicose in-laws, Sixties refugees and, in one potentially explosive instance, a black child who was born via a surrogacy arrangement to a woman whose (white) husband (and Paul’s brother) is not sterile.

For the first nearly 300 of the book’s 524 pages, it seems like the videoed guerrilla attacks and their accompanying impenetrable codes are the instruments of the book's title — some kind of mass and ultimately bloody cyber-attack, transmitted live via state-of-the-art tech, but after one such bloody episode, this element completely disappears. Bruno has already featured in one episode of this sequence, having been the ‘victim’ of a mocked-up execution by guillotine — highly slick, sick and convincing — in which his head was seen to roll as though for real. He is running for the French presidency in the 2027 election, though he will eventually agree to step aside and become the running-mate of an obscure but more sympathetic candidate, because the presidential incumbent, a party colleague, plans to run again in the election of 2032, and does not desire internal competition. Meanwhile, Bruno’s ambition is to secure the post of prime minister — to which, as a polytechnocrat, he is more attracted and more suited.

There are many pressing questions which arise out of these storylines, not least Houellebecq’s seemingly studied evasion of the manner in which events since the spring of 2020 have disproved his prediction that the world would remain ‘exactly the same’. But in the first half of the book, these strands give little sign of blending into a uniform or focussed narrative. Several of the plotlines, though briefly engrossing, eventually emerge as misdirections or damp squibs. There is an engaging sequence around the springing of Paul’s father from the end-of-life care home he has been admitted to, and which has suddenly turned into a deathtrap for its elderly clients, so that, for a while, it seems like the emerging cultural hostility/indifference to the aged might become the core theme of the book. This is where the character, ‘Brian’ makes his appearance, the leader of a wonderful ‘far right’ rescue group called CLASH (the ‘Committee for Liberations from Assassination in Hospitals’), a strangely familiar Houellebecq touch, in which Édouard is sprung in a spectacular rescue, which has the unforeseen consequence of almost randomly causing the death of a much younger family member.

In all of these sequences, we see things from Paul’s perspective: droll, detached, unemotional, pragmatic, vaguely principled but also cynical. Paul is in this book that typical Houellebecq character we have become accustomed to: middle-aged, educated, atheist, nihilistic, lonely-though-married, alienated from his siblings, who lives without much meaning or ambition. He works closely with Bruno and relies on him a lot as a kind of elder brother, but they are not friends, just ‘colleagues’.

Reading the early chapters, I felt the book lacked focus and coherence. Some of what seemed to be the minor plotlines were well handled — the undertones, for instance, of a reconciliation between Paul and his wife, Prudence, who have drifted apart while continuing to live together. But overall the book was taking a long time to cut to the chase — if chase there was ever to be.

It was in the broader context of Paul’s job in politics that I began to have serious questions about Houellebecq’s continued avoidance of the actual state of the real world — his treatment of the political life of his country as if the spring coup of 2020 had never happened —  which is striking, although may not be so to the vast majority of readers who live in and by the pseudo-reality constructed precisely to this end. This did not seem to be a book by the man who might plausibly be called the greatest and most engagé novelist in the world over the past twenty-five years. What was he up to? Had he finally run out of steam? He had, after all, said that this would be his last novel — what did that imply? Fatigue? Despair? Writer’s cramp? A desire to protect himself and his work from cancellation? (That did not sound like Houellebecq.) Did he calculate that including snarky remarks about Covid in his book might damage his chances of achieving a crowning glory to his career? Surely, in addition to the sanguineousness of doctors, he observed the casual brutality of police forces, the indifference of  liberal politicians, the Pilatism of judges, the mendacity of journalists and the cowardice of his fellow artists? Surely he was breathing in the totalitarian air that had been suffocating Europe since those days when he was contemplating the ‘banal’ virus?

After the midway point, the novel suddenly focussed in a most unexpected way. The guerrilla videos slipped into the background; the presidential election came and went with a slight plop and Bruno’s running-mate getting himself elected — a non-event. But now, suddenly, the story was taking off in a different direction — not outwards to confront the world and its horrors and foibles, but inwards into a very personal and private grief, with the subject of the book’s titular ‘annihilation’ emerging as at least in part a singular phenomenon, and affecting an entirely different person to the one we have been readied to align our emotions with from the beginning. Annihilation was becoming a kind of emotional thriller, a delving into the ultimate — terminal — effects of a warped culture on an actual human being.

From there, the book becomes actually majestic, to the extent that, at the end, when I described it to my wife, Rita and she asked me how many points I would give it out of ten, I said, ‘Ten!’ ‘What about his Covid stance?’ she asked. I replied that it didn’t really matter — it wasn’t that kind of book. The stuff about the filmed guerrilla raids and the presidential election had been by-the-by, either failed plot directions readapted to the development of certain characters, or misdirections designed to dwarf all questions of politics or sociology. From just after the middle, the emotional life of the book became an account of an inside job.

Although it might be somewhat plausible to identify a degree of draft-dodging in Annihilation, my feeling is that such an accusation would ultimately be unfair. This is not a book like Prophet Song — last year’s Booker prizewinner — which amounted to a radical rewriting of reality, its storyline about a ‘far right coup’ that ‘just happened’ to coincided with the actually existing Covid coup, and so ‘just happened’ to fall in with the official narrative being generated by the neo-totalitarians now in control of human society throughout the former Free World. At most, Houellebecq’s lapse amounts to an avoidance (as opposed even to evasion, a stronger charge, as in fiscal matters), and might well be excused on the basis of the irrelevance of the question to the ultimate theme of Annihilation. It is true that, in treating of the 2027 presidential election, he makes no allusion whatever to macro-events in the world post-2020. His treatment of the political domain is as though it exists in a continuum in which the presidency of France (and by implication the political leaderships of all other Western countries) has the same weight and significance it always had, There is no cloud on the horizon that might be labelled ‘WEF’ or ‘WHO’ or ‘Great Reset’ or ‘New Normal’ or ‘Totalitaria’. In one passage, he has his narrator reflect on the continuity between the modern presidency and the monarchy of pre-revolutionary France, raising the interesting possibility that the ‘avoidance’ is the quirk of the character, rather than the author. The book, remember, was published in French at the beginning of 2022, which means it would have already been at an advanced stage of its writing at the time of its author’s public observations about the ‘pandemic’ and lockdown in the spring of 2020.

It is also possible to decide that, in a certain light, i.e. from the perspective of Houellebecq’s signal themes and manifested worldview, the Covid episoide was arguably irrelevant. His themes, from the outset, have been the degradation of humanity and society, matters which most certainly rose to the surface in the post-Covid period. But Houellebecq was already over that target a long time before, certainly from the time of his 1998 book, Atomised, which lays bare the shapes and drifts of Western society in its post-1960s ‘freedom’-seeking. We therefore cannot indict him with Dante Alighieri’s line about the darkest places in Hell being reserved ‘for those who maintain their neutrality in times of crisis’. Houellebecq has paid his dues, and I suspect he would answer such a charge by pointing out that, Hell being in the world, he has already been around its nooks and corners in his writing, perhaps more exhaustively than any of his contemporaries.

From this perspective, it might also not be unreasonable for Houellebecq to plead (and here I am putting words in his nib) that what has happened since the spring of Covid has been no more than a modification of political and social reality to fit the already degraded and debased nature of Western man, and that, from the perspective of the novelist, the societal rearrangement of the furniture is a relatively minor matter. He might also plead that, to retroactively rewrite his backdrop narrative in a manner that — because the implied modifications would so little (if at all) affect the character or outlook of his protagonist — would have amounted to a gratuitous interference with his novel’s deeper functioning, and for a relatively shallow purpose.

That is presuming that he has since altered his view of the Covid aspect, whereas, of course, it is entirely possible that he had given the matter little or no further thought. My own view is that, whereas his position on the matter, as expressed in 2020, remains a niggling irritant, it cannot amount to a criticism of this novel as a work of literature.

Perhaps, though, he might reconsider his vow to have Annihilation be his last book, and perhaps pen one further volume of the Houellebecq oeuvre, a novel about a novelist called ‘Michel Houellebecq’, who has published a book in which, to avoid cancellation, he ducks the Covid question, and gets cancelled anyway. Chastened, he writes another book in which he exposes the whole scam, and this becomes a worldwide best-seller and brings the coup to a dramatic conclusion.

The second half of the novel is a meditation on dying, and it is magnificent. The man who is dying is considerably younger than the author (Houellebecq is now either 68 or 66), and also considerabley younger than his father, Édouard, who has suffered the stroke and had to be rescued from a murder-home by Brian and his excellent warriors from CLASH.

The abrupt onset of the fatal illness in this central character reads almost as though Houellebecq is telling of events he has lived through himself. Paul discovers that he has cancer or the mouth, which arose from an infected tooth. (Houellebecq has notoriously terrible teeth.) He describes the development of symptoms, the moments of diagnosis, the breaking of bad news, followed by worse — the penny dropping slowly at first, then abruptly. He describes the treatment, the wrestling with options, the effect on and reactions of the beloved, the coming to terms, and much more. If this is to be Houellebecq’s last novel, then this will be the section that, in time, will be drawn upon to parse his mindset and outlook on the world, to be pored over by those future literary archeologists seeking answers to the puzzlles and conundrums which have attended his philosophical trajectory as he went from literary enfant terrible to venerable man of letters. It is a description laden down with tenderness, but without a scintilla of sentimentality. It is earthy, fatalistic and real. Few writers have approached the flames of death with such decisiveness and courage, and achieved such perfect pitch. Its positioning at the end of his last novel seems to me to offer it as the key to unpicking the strange uniqueness of Houellebecq’s novelistic genius. In this modern trail to Golgotha, Houellebecq steers pointedly and determinedly into the personal realm, confronting the issues of love and loss and grief and hope that he has touched on so many times but also skated away from, laying false trails in almost Dylanesque mode, withholding definitive judgement and couching his implied conclusions in ambiguity and evasion.

Houellebecq’s characters — as I’ve noted previously — being generally menopausal, alienated men, have in common that their desires and intelligence have burst the banks of their humanity. They are men who feinted at life in the way nature and/or culture appeared to have programmed them, but found themselves rebuffed and cast back on their limited capacity to formulate a Plan B. In their mapless struggling to formulate such a new approach, they do not know what to do with themselves. They have this paradoxically redemptive quality: that contemporary culture denies them the right to become victims, rendering them largely incapable of inciting pity, or empathy. Though mostly blameless in the context of their own actions, they are ‘Guilty' nonetheless (as charged), and are literally left without anyone to blame but themselves.

In this book, Houellebecq attempts something he has never tried before: he tests the limits of this hypothesis of manhood in search of some strand of redemption. His may not be the deepest-plumbed of literary characters, but nor do they strike you as cyphers. They seem (without effort or even consciousness of the author) to convey a sense of a world bearing in on them that is coercive, dull and restrictive, a world falling way short of its potential, but nevertheless overbearing, unforgiving and remorselessly sure of itself. (Much like the world has increasingly become since the spring of 2020.) You can feel in their personalities the mood of the times they live through, without these being more than fleetingly touched on by way of sociological analysis. It has been remarked that these male characters always resemble the author himself. They feel all too real, but they are creatures of the culture more than individuals driven by particular genetic structures, histories, motivations, still less psychologies. Trapped by the pratfall of material conformity, they have ceased seeking to assert their individuality or independence. They go with the flow, until eventually the flow overcomes them.

There is in Houellebecq’s novels a strange hint of nostalgia, as though for a world that may have existed, or ought to exist, or should have, but he cannot be sure. He refers specifically to something along the lines of such a concept once in the book as the world from before; ‘before what’ is unclear. Maybe before modernity, or before globalism, or before prosperity, or before cleverness, or rather cleverality. Or just ‘before’ all the things that readers of Houellebecq understand as problematic in the world, while no longer feeling they can do anything about them.

In reviewing Serotonin, five years ago, I wrote of his protagonists:

Mostly they are carried along by the general pathology, walled-in by ennui and lack of expectation. Occasionally, they capitulate to bouts of grief brought on by nostalgia for something they barely remember knowing. In their unravelling, these characters make visible the gruesome reality of the world man has made in his determination to become his own deity, although Monsieur Houellebecq might not put it in quite those terms.

Houellebecq writes about the disappointment, sadness, loneliness, anguish, terror, boredom, despair — imposed by a culture unfit for human habitation. He exposes the freedom con pedalled since the Sixties and defended in the name of what is called progress. He summons up a diseased world, leaving the reader repelled and unsettled, but also relieved that at last the truth is told. He does not raise false hopes, but presents his characters in extremis within the collapsing culture, their humanity no longer capable of extending into the available space. But all the while there is an implicit comparison of an unexpected kind: that something better is possible; something that may once have existed, perhaps a memory deep in the recesses of the reader’s mind.

All this can be detected or observed in Annihilation, but in a rather novel way for Houellebecq, in that he seems now to have ceased fighting the world or trying to fix it.

I observed too — again in my review of Serotonin — that, whereas with most writers, the subtextual comparisons they generally make between the presented reality and the implicit ideal are personal ones, with Houellebecq they are social in the sense that Arthur Miller talked of all plays being social: ‘they engage a community, called an ‘audience’, in a journey that pulls it together in understanding(s), if only in that space, for the duration of that performance.’

This is notably less true of Annihilation. It is a different kind of Houellebecq book, one directed at the inner life of his chief character, as though he has been reading Anita Brookner, whom I would call the master of the genre, and whom he mentions several times in Annihilation.

Serotonin is in some respects a bleak novel — in terms of existential outlooks and options, certainly. The authorial voice in that book, though open to possibility, is relentlessly downbeat. Happiness today, it observes, ‘is nothing but an old dream, the past conditions for its existence are simply no longer being fulfilled.’ The central meditation of that book might be defined as the idea that time has played tricks that lead us to follow things that cannot lead where they once did.

In Annihilation, Houellebecq is as though seeking to attack this proposition, to restore the hope of love before the end. Here, perhaps fittingly, we arrive at the end of the road, where there is no longer any room or opportunity to fix anything, and yet things seem to fix themselves, though only on life’s terms, which are hard and immovable. Though, if anything, his view of transcendent possibility reads as even more sceptical than before, Houellebecq constructs a profoundly moving tableau of human responses in the face of individual annihilation. Even here, he plays against what the reviewer, reaching for his Catechism of Cliché, might call ‘the redemptive power of love,’ but — being Houellebecq — setting things up so that it may as readily read as the redemptive power of loneliness. And yet not — much more than that, for here he transcends his own natural cynicism with the power of his writing and his clear desire to fulfill his duty to his readers by not leaving our questions utterly unanswered.

He does not rush into the arms of God or a God or god, but toys with New Age concepts nowadays more prevalent in our culture, though purely in the manner of psychological crutches and, it seems, by way of acknowledging the questions without affirming the answers. His dying protagonist picks up on the Wiccan flirtations of his now reconciled wife, and even uses them on his road to Calvary in much the way a drunk might use a wicket fence as he stumbles along the road home, maintaining balance by occasional light contact with something incapable of bearing his weight, and yet sufficient to retain his equilibrium as he is hastened to the end line.

Michel Houellebecq is aware of the central problem of the God-shaped hole: that our societies, which have shown themselves incapable of functioning without transcendent dimensions, have at the same time, by becoming ‘clever' in a certain limited way, rendered transcendence implausible. Although he has flirted with literal belief, he seems to remain a non-believer who hankers after the secular benefits and spiritual consolation of Christendom. But therein lies the problem: that he seems to be resigned that belief is something we've 'evolved' beyond, so that either we are all doomed or perhaps that our best hope might be to fake it (that seemed to me to be a strong inference from Serotonin — which of course cannot be a solution for a society, although it can be a solution for an individual within a still-functioning, or half-functioning, religious society) and keep walking that line to the end.

The death that becomes inevitable towards the end of Annihilation is approached as though it is the author’s own. It is as if he is investing his character with the qualities he would wish to manifest at the end, as a man without a clear faith in transcendence, and yet a need for some ‘hopium’ to carry him safely across the border without medicinal assistance. In that sense, what he seeks to depict is an ideal death, or the best stab a man might be capable of making at such, in the present social and cultural circumstances. It is a death without excess of tears, and with a mixture of acceptance and suppressed grief and quite a bit (this being a Houellebecq novel) of sexual activity. It’s as though Houellebecq’s final answer to the questions he has been asking about the world and its continuing fitness for human habitation is that we at least face the end of the road with courage and poise.

Incongruously, it strikes me as a little reminiscent of the last phase of the music of Johnny Cash — the American albums, towards the end, especially American VI, Ain’t No Grave, released by its producer, Rick Rubin, after Cash’s death in 2003. These albums, which amounted while he was alive to a whole new career and, afterwards, a whole new legend for Cash, told the story of the end of his life, almost to the moment of his death. In a strange way, those albums seemed — again, incongruously — to echo the way that Cash’s near contemporary, Pope John Paul II, lived his final decline openly to the end, as though preaching about the meaning of existence through witnessing to his own frailty and mortality in a manner independent of words.

The last section of the book is therefore radically affecting, as much for the fact of being Houellebecq’s swansong as for the final journey of his chief protagonist. To a high degree, the two go together, as though hand-in-hand, a baffled but proud march into eternity or oblivion. For those who have become addicted to Houellebecq, the core of his appeal might be termed something like experiential authenticity. Once, in an interview, he characterised himself as ‘the author of a nihilistic era and the suffering that goes along with nihilism’. Yet, he is not a nihilist, rather a romantic who flirts with nihilism in order to demonstrate its limits and absurdities.

He is, too, is a master of constructing lives that, although in some vague sense still constructs, are powerfully convincing and adaptable. In creating his characters, he mines as though within his own being, and portrays what comes across as his own core state, which transmits as a continuous consciousness developed over decades — through childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, into middle age — and in a way that finds harmony in the experience of the reader who, hooked, chooses to remain in this - yes! — relationship. By some alchemy he makes this palpable without labouring it, even without seeming to be aware that he is doing it. Reading his prose feels like ingesting the very fodder from which consciousness is constructed, like a transfusion of thinking and feeling that randomly fits with your own ‘thought group’. At the culmination of Annihilation, I felt more prepared for death than I had ever felt before; it may not last, but I know where to go to restore it when it fades.  

The ending makes the whole book resonate at a level beyond its rational structure and set of propositions, notwithstanding that several issues have appeared to be dead in the water. The CLASH episode, earlier on, appears at the time to be as much an act of bravado as of mercy, but the ending changes all that, as the author is revealed as a kind of determined (‘eternal’?) optimist — still hoping after all these years — though not in anything specific or preachable. By reversing  the sequence of events, it is possible to observe a moral equation open up between the sorrow and loneliness of death suffered by the individual and the empathy out of which the inheritance of human rights and freedoms has emerged. We care because we die. We die easier, having cared. By hiding from death we increase our fears of it; by facing it we simply wait for it to take us, and thereby deny it dominion over us. There is no point in tears, no point in protest. The ending of Annihilation is real. It is not especially hopeful, nor particularly despairing. Death is itself, just as life is itself. This is this; it’s not something else.

In an earlier section, addressing the manner in which his surgeon breaks the bad news to him in instalments, the dying man reflects on the quality of lying that is sometimes necessary to make life bearable: ‘The ideal lie consists in the juxtaposition of different truthful elements, with certain ellipses left between them; in essence it consists of omissions, sometimes carefully blended with a number of slight exaggerations.’

In another passage, Houellebecq (or rather his dying character) reflects on the most suitable books to be read while in the process of dying. He finds Sherlock Holmes most congenial, being most suited to detaching himself from his own existence. Nothing but a novel could have achieved this — no movie, no piece of music (‘music was intended for the healthy’); philosophy and poetry, and biography or autobiography, are unsuitable also — for reasons, I gather, akin to those diagnosed by John McGahern: ‘Life is too thin to be art.’ This may never be so true as it becomes in the approaching of death: ‘He needed the narration of lives other than his own.’ And no, he insists, those other lives ‘don’t even need to be captivating … it wouldn’t have mattered if the lives related had been just as bleak and uninteresting as his own; they just had to be other.’

Fiction, then, offers the best, perhaps the sole cultural palliative: Having once been (almost) there, I would have thought that even fictional lives not yet under sentence might have seemed an unbearable provocation in these circumstances, but I trusted Houellebecq’s instinct and went with the flow. Here, surely, is an exalted ambition for the future of fiction: to suggest to us how we might circumvent the traps our myopias have stored up for us, and to accompany us in our journeying to the end.

The novel at the terminus

The novel was dying for some time before Houellebecq came along. He seemed not so much to set out to revive it as to seek to place a full stop after its culmination. He may well have achieved the direct opposite.

In The Decline of the Novel, his 2019 black-capping of the form, Joesph Bottum asserts that the novel was essentially a Protestant creation. He first conceived his psychoanalysis of the novel as a case study of the weakening of the cultural significance of Protestantism to American and European life. Noting that the form started out and sustained itself for 300 years with a mission to reveal the ‘thick self in a thin universe’, he traced its origins to ‘a Protestantism of the air’ that emerged immediately after the Reformation. ‘The modern novel had any number of ancestors, back through the history of writing, but it came squalling to birth in England in the eighteenth century and was dressed in very Protestant clothing,’ he writes. It ‘came into being to present the Protestant story of the individual soul as it strove to understand its salvation and achieve its sanctification, illustrated by the parallel journey of the new-style characters, with their well-finished interiors, as they wandered through their adventure in the exterior world.’

The primary function of the novel, he elaborated, was to describe ‘the crisis of the modern self’, and a key element of their appeal was that, at their best, novelists proposed solutions to the dilemmas and difficulties of humanity.

‘The novel at its most serious aimed at re-enchantment. It hungered to impart a kind of glow to the objects of the world, standing against the modern turns to technological science, bureaucratic government and commercial economics.’

If the natural world is imagined as empty of purpose, then the hunt for Nature’s importance is supernatural by definition. If the physical order is defined by its scientifically measured presence, then the search for meaning in the physical order is necessarily metaphysical. And if the secular realm is understood merely as arbitrary social arrangements enforced by the powerful, then the attempt to uncover social value must be religious.

It will immediately be obvious that almost none of this still holds true. The supernatural has become synonymous with superstition; metaphysics has become a synonym for magic; and the postmodern deconstruction of reality has, far from rehabilitating religion, simply disposed of it as another form of baneful, abusive power.

As Bottum continues to describe things, the evolution of modernity stripped reality of its sustenance for the ‘thick’ human soul, creating a downward spiral of human degradation and societal breakdown. ‘[T]he thick inner world of the self increasingly seemed to seem ill-matched with the impoverished outer world, stripped of all the old enchantment that had made exterior objects seem meaningful and important, significant in themselves. This is what we mean by the crisis of the self: Why does anything matter, what could be important, if meaning is invented, coming from the self rather than to the self?’

These postmodern conditions are what Houellebecq arrived to as a new kind of prophet. He peopled his universe with characters who had become thin under the attrition of thin reality. According to Bottum, this disintegration began and escalated during the 1990s, when Protestantism began failing throughout the West, precisley the moment of Houellebecq’s arrival.

‘Of the authors who have published novels since the early 1990s,’ Bottum adds, ‘none is mandatory reading.’

In this he is wrong. It is hard to imagine that he has neither read nor heard of Michel Houellebecq, but if so he has failed to grasp his significance.

We have arrived in an age when novels have been reduced to vacuous diversions from reality, while at the same time they are dressed up as new revolutions in literature — from ‘chick lit’ to ‘chic lit’ — the weaponising of lifestyle logic to pass of the pretence that vacuosness is substance. Amounting to no more than outcrops of technological media like TV and podcasts, these ‘novels’ function, with their primary-coloured covers, essentially as status symbols and pointed indicators of assumed identities and spuriously claimed depth. Then comes Houellebecq, who approaches the form with the mien of an undertaker rather than a healer. He sometimes owns up to nihilism, yet — if so, and it is doubtful —  is of the kind of ’nihilist’ who cares enough to be angry about what he detects (and exposes) in society and its rotting structures and cultures. Like Nietzsche and Beckett, he presents what sometimes seems like a cynicism begging to be wrong, an inverted mysticism that longs for that which he has lost the capacity to imagine. And, somehow, in what emerges there resonates a new way of seeing reality, a view not yet in focus, but getting there.

What makes his characters interesting is precisely their thinness-in-thin-reality, their constant struggle to overcome the received assumptions (‘meanings’, as Bottum couches it) yet mostly failing because the culture is too total and overwhelming. Yet, still they go on, because they must. Houellebecq lets loose these figures in a landscape of filth and senselessness, and sets them off on a hunt for redemption. Because their souls are thin, they seem doomed to failure, because the ‘redemption’ is never more than a change of ideological outlook, so that the denouements can as easily be read as triumphs or catastrophes. In this book, he has — almost miraculously — transcended this obstacle, though it is as yet unclear whether this is a mere accident. We know Paul is going to die, but we sense that this is not the end of it, that the meaning of his life and death will endure and make a difference — somehow, somewhere, sometime.

Joseph Bottum laments:

Of course I know, as you know, any number of dedicated novel-readers today. But I do not know — and I suspect you do not know — many who still read novels in the older senses: novel-reading as a necessary part of participation in public life, akin to (and more important than) the news. Or novel-reading as the great hunt for insight into the human condition, akin to (or, at least, providing the raw material for) serious intellectual analysis of ethics, political theory, and psychology. Or novel-reading as the chance to observe authors performing heroic acts of cultural hygiene.

This may be the greatest and ultimate literary (as opposed to metaphysical) value of Michel Houellebecq: that, for a brief period between the end of the twentieth century and the second quarter of the twenty-first, he restored that function — cultural hygiene — to the novel, every few years giving us back the feeling that, in reading a fictional story, we were restored to being the proprietors of our societies, albeit in the manner of the impoverished householder who, for one last winter, burns the furniture to keep warm and knows that when the last chair-leg is burned, he will die of hypothermia. With Annihilation, he has given us something more promising. Let us hope that he will not keep his word, and that these are not his last.

To buy John a beverage, click here

If you are not a full subscriber but would like to support my work on Unchained with a small donation, please click on the ‘Buy John a beverage’ link above.