There are few more effective recommendations for a book than being poked awake in the middle of the night by your partner exhorting, "You have to listen to this!" That is how I was introduced to Michel Houellebecq by my French-speaking wife, who was sitting up in bed reading La Carte et le Territoire (The Map and the Territory), tears of laughter streaming down her face.
Despite my patchy French and the lateness of the hour, I understood enough to realise that it was indeed hilariously written, and full of merciless dissections of contemporary social situations.
Until then, perhaps influenced by disparaging reviews, I had been reluctant to read Houellebecq's books. But reading Atomised, which won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award in 2002, convinced me that he was a writer of genius. Funny, irreverent, indifferent to Jamesian niceties of character and plot, hostile to political correctness, Houellebecq in his deadpan prose occasionally rose to a delirious loathing approaching the heights of poetry, in the great tradition of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. He seemed to me a man holding up a mirror to society, in all its seedy unpleasantness.
Last autumn I spent some time at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris, and came in contact with a broad range of Parisian writers and academics. I quickly came to understand that Houellebecq was not a name to drop on the Left Bank. My enthusiasm was met with anything from mild distaste to passionate denunciation of his racism, obscenity, misogyny, Islamophobia and, above all, vulgarity.
One academic said, "His characters and subject matter just don't interest me." How could things like Islamic terrorism and sex tourism be of any interest to people inside the citadel? Strangely, the left seemed to label him as right wing, when to me his novels read like textbook Marxist analyses of the workings of free-market economics in the cultural spheres of love and sex – or, as he put it himself in the title of an early novel, Broadening of the Area of Struggle.
But evidently he writes about the wrong kind of proletariat, in their tawdry world of offices, laboratories, provincial discos and swinger clubs.
Another particularly sore point seemed to be his popularity outside of France. This, they implied, was not the image of France they wanted projected abroad.
By now the world knows that last Wednesday was the publication date of his new novel, Submission, not coincidentally bearing the same name as the film by Theo van Gogh, for which he was murdered by an Islamic extremist in 2004, and Houellebecq featured on the cover of this week's Charlie Hebdo.
Submission is a satire set in 2022, in which an Islamicised France is governed by a coalition of Muslim parties with the old centre left and right, and Houellebecq is once again provocatively testing the limits of free speech, deriding all religions, but particularly Islam, as cretinous.
The first edition sold out immediately. Apparently, many French people feel the time has come to read Houellebecq.
Michael O'Loughlin was writer in residence at Irish Cultural Centre in Paris last autumn. His most recent collection of poetry is In This Life
