Buy this book

Michael Savage
posted 23 December 2005

The old adage that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover was never more wrong. The publisher has dispensed with the bland rent-a-puffs from the usual second-raters and has-beens. Instead, we're treated to a seductive photo of a bathing woman. Even if I wasn't already a Houellebecq (pronounced Wellbeck by the aficionado) fan, I'd pick this book out any day. And it's a good guide to the content.

Michel Houellebecq is provocative and direct. Sometimes these are endearing strengths, but sometimes it's trivial self-parody. Reactions usually gravitate to one of these poles - he's either crude and over-publicised, or he's a great original novelist on the level of Joyce.

His crude directness makes him like the Quentin Tarantino of the contemporary novel. But just as Tarantino seems less and less brilliant with the passage of time, we should avoid over-praising Houellebecq. The Possibility of an Island, his latest book, is a variation on a familiar Houellebecq theme (sun, sea and sex, plus cults and cloning). It's so similar to previous plots that he shouldn't have written it, but the idea of ripping off the literary public with an old book and a new cover probably appeals to Houellebecq. And it is a great cover.

His critique is relentlessly literal and forcefully unsubtle. Political culture is insistently multicultural, so Houellebecq says Islam is a stupid religion. Society is feminised, so Houellebecq is crudely pornographic. Fear of scientific progress is rampant, so Houellebecq's anti-heroes are clones. Houellebecq's outrageous naughtiness, nihilistic misery and crude sexiness appeal to the inner teenager. For example, he writes that, 'Like all very pretty young girls she was basically only good for fucking, and it would have been stupid to employ her for anything else, to see her as anything other than a luxury animal' (156). This is a militant feminist's crassest stereotype of male subjugation of women. Liberals want to be horrified, but they know they're being goaded, so they mostly keep quiet.

Instead of attacking him directly for being offensive, people more often say that he is unintelligently literal, an unworthy heir to the French novelistic tradition of Camus and Sartre. It's not that we're offended, they unconvincingly claim, it's just that he's not very good. It makes me hanker after the idea of offensiveness as a legitimate critical term. The valid question is whether it is gratuitous - that is, superfluous (or even contrary to) the artistic aims of the whole. For Houellebecq, the offensiveness is absolutely integral, but it's not the whole point. He wants to challenge our easy assumptions, and he takes the easy route by being rude to us. But it's the detail that redeems the whole.

Houellebecq's oblique and surprising cultural references can be charming. Against what James Wood dubs the 'hysterical realists', his prose is sparse and his factoids startling. On porn, he writes:

Since their beginnings, fellatio has always been the jewel in the crown of porn films, the only thing that can serve as a useful model for young girls; it was also the only incidence in which you could occasionally find a bit of real emotion in the act, because it is the only incidence in which the close-up is, also, a close up of the face of the woman, where you can read in her features that joyful pride, that childlike delight she feels when giving pleasure. (142)

The smutty bits are particularly quotable, but odd observations like this crop up throughout the novel.

His abrupt style and provocative fables are winning. Whilst no one can fail to acknowledge the freshness of his voice against the bland cacophony of self-important pseudo-erudition, he does not stand comparison with the great teenage philosophers like Nietzsche. The tedious question of Houellebecq's greatness cannot be resolved in his favour. He demands attention and repays engagement more than many conventional storytellers and pompous stylists.