Atomised
Michel Houellebecq

Munira Mirza

'Intelligent people should soon be divided between those who have and haven't read it yet.'
The Sunday Times

Critics have raved about Atomised, a dark and difficult novel about the degeneration of humanity in the late twentieth century. Set in France and focusing on the distant lives of two half brothers, Bruno and Michel, the book explores their early tragic childhoods and the far-reaching consequences of growing up in an atomised world. Michel is a brilliant but emotionless scientist who, it is gradually revealed, develops a new scientific theory of humanity's evolution.

Bruno, insecure and sexually unconfident, is the opposite of Michel's cold rationalism. He is relentless in his pursuit of sexual pleasure, and entirely dominated by his animal urges. Both share the same careless mother who abandoned them when they were children for a life of hedonism in the 60s. These brothers, despite growing up separately and in different contexts, are both products of a liberated and individualised world. Neither is able to share the sympathies of another human being completely and neither can be saved by love.

The novel throws up many interesting questions about contemporary society, giving us extreme, often repulsive, cases of a widely felt condition of isolation. The brothers' loneliness exemplifies a state of humanity which lacks collective values or beliefs. Bruno's insecurities and vulnerability lead him to focus on sex, while Michel recoils away from love completely and prefers to mull over his atoms on the computer screen. They are selfish characters, all their lives presented with the choice to do the right thing and neither able to do it.

The narrator is keen to draw the relation between the hopeless lives of the characters and wider historical forces. Houellebecq's erudition adds intellectual spice to this engaging and often moving story. The narrative weaves together personal anecdotes, historical crises, and the laws of biology and physics, along with theories of existentialism. The style of narration may at times seem heavy-handed and flat, but by the end of the novel this starts to feel like the rather reliable voice of reason.

There are, however, problems with Houellebecq's diagnosis. While he is right to place some of the blame for modern society's ills on the decline of the political left and the lifestyle politics of the 1960s, he is too quick to attack individualism as the cancer of our times. Indeed it is the opposite. Rather than being strong willed individuals, his main characters are weak, unable to connect with others because they are afraid, rather than determined. Atomisation then is not a result of greater freedom but of our inability truly to attain it.

To his merit, however, Houellebecq mercilessly attacks the New Age fanaticism that emerges out of the libertine 60s and with savage wit exposes the boys' betrayal. The mother's immoral abandonment of her children is an apt metaphor for the way in which the left abandoned collectivist politics for its orientations towards consumerism and lifestyle choices.

Atomised is a sincere and angry novel which does not shrink away from big ideas (although its ending perhaps goes too far in trying to suggest we are on the precipice of big change). While it may disgust some readers with its evocation of depravity, it is also curiously affirming of the reasons why humans need each other and continue to insist on love.

Make sure you're in the camp of those who've read it.