Annihilation, by Michel Houellebecq – A Review

A glowing review of the latest novel from France’s finest writer.

It is quite rare that I look forward to the release of a new book. Generally, I like working my way through older texts—ones that have stood the test of time and whose beauty and wisdom are nearly assured. When you buy a new book, of course, it might be terrible. Perhaps that sounds ridiculous, but we are only here on Earth for a short period of time and we can only spend so much of that time reading, so why not dig into the books you know—or have good reason to suspect—will be enjoyable or informative? Why not read the works that inspired your favourite writers? The greats are considered great for good reason.

I did, however, look forward to reading the latest from Michel Houellebecq, one of our only remaining enfants terribles. His novels have been provocative and brilliant in equal measure. He is one of those very few artists now whose critics generally agree is gifted. They just feel that he has an asshole. That’s something I can understand, but I’ve always felt that we ought to afford geniuses some leeway. The great artists and scientists often had dark sides or weaknesses that make their lives the subject of engaging biographies but also make them unpalatable to the modern Western mind. For the most part, these people—invariably men—would simply not be allowed to exist now. Could we have another Hemingway? Another Hunter Thompson? Another William Burroughs? I highly doubt it.

Yet in France, they respect Houellebecq enough—and retain a belief in freedom of speech that is rapidly dying in English-speaking countries—to allow him to publish widely. Sure, he is attacked for being Islamophobic. France is not untouched by the scourge of le wokisme. But genius is still allowed to exist. Thoughts are allowed to be aired. And we outside the Francophone world are allowed to enjoy him in translation because his Frenchness makes him slightly exotic and therefore the constraints of woke censorship are more loosely applied.

Anyway, digressions aside, I recently read his latest and supposedly last novel. As a fan of his previous ones (and I think I’ve read almost all of them but not yet his non-fiction), I looked forward to Annihilation. Given how prophetic his work can be, I wondered what insight it would provide into our future…

Okay, I don’t actually believe he is prophetic, but he is an astoundingly astute observer and I would go as far as to say that in terms of his observations and wisdom this is by far his greatest work. In fact, I would say there is more wisdom in this book than any other book I have ever read. The way he describes the world, from minute details to national politics to the grand questions of life and death, he is just staggeringly perceptive. I don’t generally make many notes when I read, but going through this one on my Kindle, I highlighted 66 passages. Maybe that doesn’t sound like many, but my average is 2.

First things first, I will say that the book is classically Houellebecqian in the sense that it is bleak and nihilistic from the offset. The first sentence is:

Particularly if you’re single, some Mondays in late November or early December make you feel as if you’ re in death’s waiting room. The summer holidays are a distant memory, the new year still far in the future: the proximity of nothingness is unfamiliar.

Ye gods, that is a dark start to a novel. What is darker, however, is that it follows an arc (and I will try to explain this without spoilers) that brings us from the bleak to the joyous to far bleaker, which in essence compounds the effect of the pessimism. Yet, as numerous other reviewers have noted, Houellebecq is—in spite of my claim here—on oddly romantic form. Even in his “death death death” mode, he seems to highlight the joys of life and the little glimmers of hope: a final blowjob, the breeze in a forest that is for once mercifully free of tourists, a glass of wine and a piece of acceptable cheese. He even seems fairly set on the notion that we are reincarnated, so death is but a transition, and that love will continue from one life to the next and onwards in a painfully beautiful story…

So yes, Houellebecq has “gone romantic,” as the critics say, which is a surprising turn, but as I commented he also manages to retain his nihilistic yet somehow anti-nihilist stance, depicting as always the Western world in the late stages of decline. Houellebecq seems to describe a country where everything new is awful and the ancient culture and natural world are lost. The modern environment is so depressing that it seems to have been made for the very purpose of demoralising its inhabitants. Even the convenient, apparently positive parts of modern life signal loss:

there are generally brasseries open late at night, near the big railway stations, offering traditional dishes to lonely travellers, without really managing to convince them that they still merit a place in an accessible human world characterized by family cooking and traditional dishes.

Houellebecq’s novels have often depicted human life in strangely economic terms and that is true of Annihilation. Here again he is perceptive and depressingly so, for what he perceives in the modern world are the obvious signs of people’s lives losing real meaning and connections between humans deteriorating to the point where we are but individuals floating pointlessly in our own self-obsessed universes. One such quote—of the many highlights I’ve pulled from my Kindle—reads:

an improvement in living conditions often goes hand in hand with a deterioration of reasons for living, and living together in particular.

And this is what I love about Houellebecq. It is depressing and good god it hurts to think about, but he’s right. He’s absolutely right. In so many cases, he points out problems with our world to which we are generally oblivious. We have normalised these changes, to use a rather modern phrase.

In terms of relationships, he captures the strange late-life resumption of a marriage between Paul and Prudence. They never divorced or even separated but simply lived together for a decade without sex or real love. She became a Wiccan vegan and he works for the government, helping a civil servant on the cusp of leading France. It seems for a while that the book will be about Paul’s efforts to stop a series of terrorist attacks by deciphering a strange pentagrammic code but plot is not really important here. Perhaps it was merely a vehicle necessary for Houellebecq to cover all the ground he wanted in what is essentially a philosophical, political, and theological study of the 21^st century.

He notes that “the maintenance of any kind of sexual activity in an established couple is in itself a real success, the exception more than the rule,” and couples are lucky if they can “[attain] a kind of standardized despair.” The relationship is portrayed wonderfully and touchingly and sees Houellebecq display a very romantic side, yet also we again have a dark humour shine through that sometimes undermines it as even love becomes another excuse to savage the things people generally believe:

Prudence smiled and accepted his departure with the requisite good humour, although her confusion was apparent in little circular hand gestures, as if, by creating Cartesian vortices in the ether, she could create a force of attraction between them, perhaps something resembling gravitational forces. And yet the non-existence of both ether and Cartesian vortices had been demonstrated a long time since, and there was no doubt at all on the subject in the scientific community, in spite of the last stand by Fontanelle, who in 1752 would publish Theory of Cartesian Vortices with Reflections on Attraction, a work which left no legacy.

As I’ve said, this is a dark book. It is depressing and true and thought-provoking… and yet we frequently have passages like this one, which are hilarious. Again and again, I found myself laughing aloud at his dry wit.

But whether witty or not, he is always skewering modern conventions and saying to his reader “Look how fucking stupid this all is. Look at our lives. Where is the meaning? Where is the beauty? Where did our spines go?” For example, here he is talking about the wonders of modern train travel:

And Bruno, he knew, would have felt equally ill at ease with these gourmet burgers, the Zen spaces where one could have one’s cervical vertebrae massaged for the duration of the journey while listening to birdsong, this strange labelling of luggage ‘for safety reasons’, so with the general turn that things had taken, with this pseudo-playful atmosphere which was in fact normative in an almost fascistic way, which had gradually infected the tiniest crannies of everyday life

Houellebecq seems to view the past as a space where people tried and often failed, but looks at the modern world as a place where no one bothers to try anymore. And why would they? In the modern world, governments have pried their way into every part of human life and humans themselves have forced their way into every part of the world. Invariably, these incursions are negative:

Unfortunately it was impossible not to notice that a pleasant landscape, these days, was in almost every case a landscape that had been preserved from any human intervention for at least a century.

That is—in my opinion—absolutely true. Now compare it to a much later scene from urban France:

the wearying algebra of high-rises, detached houses and towers was enough to stamp out any spark of hope. More than ever, the imposing buildings of Bercy rose like a totalitarian citadel grafted onto the heart of the city.

Critics often call him conservative because he is not a virtue-signalling lunatic who fawns stupidly over the latest faddish trends but readers of Houellebecq’s books know that he attacks the right with venom on a regular basis. They call him Islamophobic but oftentimes his treatment of Islam (minus the Jihadists) is filled with admiration rather than contempt. He generally seems to look around the world with that sort of view we had in the late 20^th century, which is to say valuing equality and human decency. That is of course the opposite of wokism, which he brilliantly puts down in this brief and amusing statement:

Then she asked his age and his ethnic appearance – a white man in his late forties was perfect, that was exactly the type of client that she was looking for; apparently the criteria for escorts were at the opposite end of the value system usually advocated by the centre-left media.

How true once again! But Houellebecq is not only a perceptive and fearless writer. He also writes with flare. I’m aware that my French is terrible but I do admire how he has been translated. His books use punctuation oddly to create a rhythm that is hard to describe but which creates a unique and engaging voice. For example:

Of course Aurélien hadn’t immediately realized that he had married a piece of shit, and a venal piece of shit at that, it’s a thing you don’t realize immediately, it takes a few months at the very least to understand that you’re going to live in hell, and that it isn’t a simple hell, there are plenty of circles, over the years he had plunged into a sequence of increasingly oppressive layers, each one darker and more stifling than the last, the acrimonious words that they exchanged each evening were filled each time with more and more hatred.

He has layered clause upon clause in grammatically unconventional ways, and at the same time he has described the pathetic and tragic situation of one poor man in a way that evokes sympathy and causes laughter. What level of genius can achieve this so readily?

Such humour appears often and randomly and sometimes subtly. Here he is going after academia with great wit:

Once again he was obliged to note that his library was poor when it came to philosophy, but in the end he happened upon a large volume among his science books, entitled Contemporary Philosophy and Physics, which seemed to provide some enlightenment, or at least some perspectives on the subject, not that the author was really setting out the case for the existence of God, but he did express some doubts about the existence of the world, and more generally prompted questions about the concept of existence in general. Thus, for example, in a rather sibylline phrase, he asserted: ‘The word is not made up of what is, but of what happens.’ At the end of the book there was a glossary, which included an entry for the verb to happen. According to the author, this meant: ‘To be attested by an observer, in line with a certain principle of attestation.’

Again and again he attacks institutions. One theme that seems to run through the book is the idea of France becoming rather Americanised, and that is fairly subtle until this quote:

Europe as a whole had become a distant, ageing, depressive and slightly ludicrous province of the United States of America.

The main theme, though, in this book is that of old age and death. Perhaps those are two themes but I feel they are inextricably linked here. Houellebecq weaves it from the start and pushes it as the main concept towards the end. We see old people wandering confused through the halls of their care home covered in their own faeces and screaming in despair. All this, of course, is the government’s fault and the fault of a society that has lost its capacity for care in a world of selfishness and greed… He writes:

‘In all previous civilizations,’ he said at last, ‘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.

But is that bleak enough? Mais non! Il y a plus!

Human life consists of a sequence of administrative and technical difficulties, interspersed with medical problems; as age advances, medical aspects take the upper hand. Then the nature of life changes, and starts looking like a steeplechase: increasingly frequent and varied medical examinations study the state of your organs. They conclude that the situation is normal, or acceptable at least, until one of them delivers a different verdict. Then the nature of life changes again, to become a more or less long and painful journey to death.

How about this one?

The human world seemed to him to be made up of little balls of egoistic shit, unconnected and unrelated to one another, and sometimes those balls grew agitated and copulated in their own way, each in its own register, leading in turn to the existence of tiny new balls of shit.

That leads to the realisation that…

the worst thing was that if the terrorists’ goal was to annihilate the world as he knew it, to annihilate the modern world, he couldn’t entirely blame them.

Okay. I’ll stop with the quotes for now.

And I’ll stop talking about the book, in fact, because even though plot is not hugely important here, if I say any more, I will give it away and the book will be ruined for anyone still reading this. Suffice it to say, Houellebecq does relent and not only later in the book but all through it, highlighting what is good in life as well as pointing out all the awfulness around us. He suggests embracing love and sex, reading good literature (or just low-brow genre fiction), getting outside to walk around, spending time with family (even if you struggle to communicate verbally), and basically stopping to enjoy the world. Most men, he seems to say, wander aimlessly and miserably through this world and then die painfully and filled with regrets and always we are alone. However, that is not our only choice. Here is one last quote, a strange one but one that oddly inspires:

It was dizzying as a thought. If his father could get an erection, if he could read and contemplate the movement of leaves stirred by the wind, Paul said to himself, then he was lacking absolutely nothing in life.

Indeed. It is an odd sort of romanticism tucked away among a great many bleak statements, but Houellebecq’s brilliance has often involved combining the light and the dark, the tragic and the humorous. He is one of the greatest writers of our time.

Or perhaps was, for he says this is his last book. With all the talk of death, one feels perhaps he views his own time in this life as coming to an end soon. But I hope not and partly out of selfishness because after this book I would sorely love another outing from France’s finest living writer.