Three years later Serotonin, it is with a massive eighth novel of 736 pages that Michel Houellebecq projects us into a not-so-distant future, into the muffled arcana of French political life. A plot that this incisive social commentator enriches with a somewhat artificial thriller and a family crossover with dark romanticism. All this, as usual with him, unfolds on a melancholy air of decline of the West.
The 65-year-old writer’s novel opens with strange videos that have gone viral on the Internet, including a disturbing ” deep fake ”In which we see the French Minister of the Economy being guillotined. A few real but unclaimed international attacks soon followed.
Alarming events which take place a few months before the presidential election of 2027, when the outgoing president (an avatar of Emmanuel Macron, never appointed) cannot stand as a candidate because of the provisions of the French Constitution, which does not authorizes only two consecutive terms, and is looking for a puppet.
Account for the world
Prophetic, avant-garde or reactionary writer? All of the above? Claimed as much by the right as by the left, both icon of the far-right weekly Current values and dubbed by Bernard Maris in 2014 with his Houellebecq economist, Houellebecq – all the same here resolutely on the right, with his vision of a France where the left has evaporated – blurs the tracks and remains his only boss.
“I want to account for the world … I just want to report on the world …” repeats Jed Martin in The map and the territory (2010, Prix Goncourt) to the young journalist who came to question him at the end of his life on the meaning of his work. Neither judge nor prophet, Houellebecq observes from afar and with his dark glasses the ups and downs – especially the downs – of the human condition.
This is not his first foray into political fiction. We will remember that Platform (2001) had in his own way foreseen the Islamist attacks of 2001, while Submission, where the novelist imagined an Islamized France at the end of the 2022 presidential election, came out on the very day of the attack on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, in january 2015.
Family fighting shake-up
Senior official working in the cabinet of Bruno Juge, Minister of the Economy and Finance “hired to bring back to France the Trente Glorieuses” – an explicit allusion to Bruno Le Maire, the current Minister of Finance -, of which he is at the both confidant and advisor, Paul Raison is the main protagonist of this new Houellebecq.
As he approached his fiftieth, stuck in an emotional and sexual misery that had become almost comfortable, Paul “felt a calm and limitless despair rising in him”. His wife, Prudence, also in the service of public administration, recently became a vegan and follower of Wicca, a religious movement of pagan inspiration (worship of nature, magic, male-female polarity and reincarnation).
They have been living for ten years as strangers in their Parisian apartment located on the edge of Bercy Park, where they rarely meet, and together but separately “reached a sort of standardized despair”.
In the eyes of Paul, the very last fictitious alias of Houellebecq, “if the terrorists’ objective was to annihilate the world as he knew it, to annihilate the modern world, he might not prove them completely wrong. “.
Following a stroke which left him extremely reduced, his father, a retired French secret service (DGSI), will have to endure a slow rehabilitation. From there, even as politics run its course and Paul’s father is, it seems, no stranger to the investigation into the mysterious terrorist attacks, Annihilate turns into a family romance, where illness, medical end-of-life issues and acceptance of death mingle.
The reader is free to see there also a parallel with the decline of Western civilization, one of the hobbies of the author of Elementary particles (1998)
A commotion of family combat which will be the occasion for Paul, for his sister Cécile and for their young brother Aurélien to meet certain weekends in the big house of their father, in Beaujolais, and to pool their problems while reactivating old disagreements.
Events which, together with the serious health problems that Paul will also experience, will gradually warm up as if by miracle the numb couple he forms with Prudence.
The possibility of love
The writer wanted the cover ofAnnihilate either hardback, with a slice and a red bookmark in the same color as the title, an edition ” hard cover »Which is inspired by what is done in Germany and in Anglo-Saxon countries.
The length of the novel refers to Houellebecq’s interest in 19th century literature.e century, and in particular to his fervor for Balzac (“the second father of any novelist”, according to him). The meticulous descriptions are served by this sober and particular style that he maintains, and through which point here and there strange projections of administrative language or scientific popularization – dehumanizing asperities often tinged with humor.
Finally, Annihilate is a rather obese novel, fattened with seemingly useless growths, including many dream accounts (” Tell a dream, lose a reader However, said Henry James). The same goes for a few narrative threads that are launched – the terrorist attacks, the investigative work of Paul’s father, the presidential campaign – but which ultimately never ends.
A little as if Houellebecq told us that these lines of stories abandoned or become out of scope were, basically, incidental. What matters above all is this story of marital love neglected, lost and then found in extremis. Fans of the writer will enjoy following him in this long failure, whether wanted or not.
“What is the point of installing 5G,” asks Paul, “if we simply might not get in touch anymore, and perform the essential gestures, those which allow the human species to reproduce, those which also allow, sometimes to be happy? We are still far from the nihilism of which he has sometimes been accused.
A twilight and moving novel through which, despite everything, filters a little light.