Fiction: The enfants do not come more terribles than Michel Houellebecq. Hailed as one of France's most important new talents, winner of numerous literary prizes, from the Impac prize for Atomised to the Prix Interalliés for the present novel, he has also been before French courts on charges of racism and incitement to hatred, writes Michael Cronin
Houellebecq's bleak fictions are the parables of the post-Mitterrand generation with their harsh, unrelenting rejection of the consensual liberalism of the statist aristocracy. The rage in the prose and the thoroughgoing nihilism in these pages are not wholly removed from the explosive anger of the suburbs of Paris, Lyons and Marseilles. The sense of wasted lives trapped in ghettos of social despair find their dark echo in the world of Houellebecq's fictions in which liberty, equality and fraternity are more usually targets for withering cynicism than values to be loudly celebrated. The cars burning in Clichy-sous-Bois and elsewhere were not only a bonfire of French national vanities but they illuminated in their own anarchic way the sense of lost purpose that blights the lives of Houellebecq's heroes and heroines.
The interest in more marginal forms of writing such as science fiction (Houellebecq has written a book on HP Lovecraft) and popular music (he is a recorded rap artist and has been championed by the leading French rock magazine, Les Inrockuptibles) as well as the decided Anglophilia of his literary sympathies makes Houellebecq not untypical of the new generation of French writers. His distinctness lies, however, in the ferocity of his expression and in his intense preoccupation with larger questions to do with human identity and the shape of society to come.
Daniel, the central character and main narrator of The Possibility of an Island is predictably vile in his opinions on a variety of subjects. Unrelenting misogyny, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, tacit and not-so-tacit approval of paedophilia are just some of the props of the internal horror show that is Daniel's mind. He is a successful stand-up comedian and a sometime scriptwriter who uses his jokes and his films to give voice to his endlessly multiplied hatreds.
It is a psychological truism that hatred for others is generally a mask for self-hatred and Daniel, as he himself acknowledges throughout the novel, is no exception. What comes to preoccupy Daniel more and more is that he is growing old and his sexual powers are failing. Rather typically for a Houellebecq novel, however, the preoccupation becomes universal not particular and there are pages of Swiftean savagery on the fatuity of a world where people wish to remain eternally young and do not accept the inevitability of aging and death.
Daniel eventually becomes an adept of the Elohimites, a sect that promises eternal life to its followers, and the growing success of the sect is directly related to its claims to make eternity the just reward for the faithful. Houellebecq implies that if there is no hope of life beyond this one, then it logically follows that attempts will be made to prolong life as long as possible. But not any old life will do and in everything from the fad for vitamin supplements to the body fictions of nip and tuck, there is the desperate search for eternal youthfulness. A society that has abandoned the hereafter is even more terrorized about going down under.
A central argument of The Possibility of an Island is that societies do not so much renounce religions as replace them. The Elohimites are not the only ones to promise eternal life. As Daniel points out, Christians have been doing it for two millennia.
The religious parallels are reinforced by the structure of the novel which has four Elohimite evangelists telling the foundation story of the sect (we only get Daniel's version) and the (albeit bogus) resurrection of the prophet on the third day. In the novel the sect manages to create a new race of neo-humans and this race survives nuclear wars and ecological catastrophes that lay waste to much of the planet.
Thus, the story of the original Daniel is interleaved with the commentary of his clone, Daniel 25, 25 generations into the future, who has the experience of eternal life. The problem with eternity, as most children already suspect when being told about heaven, is that it can be terribly boring. If nothing carries with it the risk of an ultimate end or death, does anything much matter? There can be little passion in the couplings of the gods, only playful and ultimately monotonous variations on a theme. So in Homer, Odysseus leaves the immortal lovemaking of Calypso for the mortal embrace of Penelope and in The Possibility of an Island Daniel 25 leaves the gated community of the neo-humans for the mortal challenge of the world outside.
Houellebecq is unlikely to leave readers indifferent. Many readers will find the views and prejudices of the narrator offensive and degrading. Others will find the prose straying on the wrong side of the border between the unadorned and the banal, and still others will find too many pages are needed to detail the passion and resurrection of Daniel and that the female characters in particular are ciphers for fantasy or vilification rather than in any proper way fully realised. Houellebecq is ultimately, however, not so much an immoralist as a moralist. It is no accident that he uses a biblical template for his novel as his writing has all the urgency of predication. His is a voice which cannot be ignored because the unforgiving cruelty of the worlds both present and future that he describes are the ruthless outcomes of value systems centred on the supremacy of the market, the sacrosanct nature of individual self-interest and the relentless attack on the basis of solidarity in civil society. Liberals may be a favourite target of Houellebecq's ire but it is, ironically, neo-liberals, the most successful sect of modern times, who provide the blueprint for the post-human ghetto from which Daniel 25 flees with his life.
Gavin Bowd had no easy task in rendering Houellebecq's prose which can veer from pithy abruptness to sentimental garrulousness. He is more than equal to the task and if Houellebecq's English-language readers do not like the message, Bowd is a blameless messenger.
Michael Cronin is director of the Centre for Translation and Textual Studies, Dublin City University and co-editor of The Irish Review
The Possibility of an Island By Michel Houellebecq Translated by Gavin Bowd Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 345pp. £12.99