Michel Houellebecq is France’s most notorious novelist, not so much for his fiction as for his opinions. He has been accused of anti-Semitism and fascism; in 2001 he gave an interview in which he called Islam “the stupidest religion” and was hauled into court for inciting racial hatred. In interviews and novels, Houellebecq continues issuing strong – that is, scathing – opinions on women, technology, modern anomie and on contemporary civilization.
His newest book, “The Possibility of an Island,” has three narrators – Daniel I, an acerbic near-contemporary of ours, and Daniels 24 and 25, his cloned “descendants” a thousand years in the future. Daniel I is a bitter hedonist made rich through his career as a comedian; the routines he shares, none funny, are along the lines of “Let’s Drop Miniskirts on Palestine!” a “light Islamophobe burlesque.” Because he is insulting, he is taken as a hero of free speech; but he acknowledges, “as regards freedom, I was rather against.”
Daniel I, even retired from performing, is full of ennui and sometimes eloquent misanthropy, evidently indebted to Nietzsche. He loves his dog, Fox, and he has two “lovers,” a middle-aged woman who doesn’t like sex and a young woman who doesn’t like love. About love, although it is one of the key subjects of the novel, he writes: “Youth, beauty, strength: the criteria for physical love are exactly the same as those for Nazism.”
Family values? “On the day of my son’s suicide, I made a tomato omelet. “A living dog is worth more than a dead lion,” as Ecclesiastes rightly says. I had never loved that child: He was as stupid as his mother, and as nasty as his father. His death was far from a catastrophe; you can live without such human beings.”
“The Possibility of an Island” has more than just nasty opinions; it has a plot – in fact, too much plot. Daniel I, living in Spain, becomes aware of a cult called the Elohimites, whose leaders claim to believe in eternal life through the action of celestial beings but in fact solve the problems of eternal life through advanced science and achieve it through cloning. In the imagined future, people are born at 18 and die at 50, with a replacement clone that springs into life when the signal from the deceased is lost.
Life in the future is hardly appealing; the Future People have outlived emotion, love, laughter; they live in isolation, communicating with each other through e-mail and nourishing themselves without eating. Their world is a wasteland, and we read, for instance, of “a muddy, indistinct area” – seen on a computer screen rather than in reality, by Daniel 24- “that we continue to call the sea, and which was once the Mediterranean.” There are a few lingering human beings still around, living like savages and treated like vermin by the neohumans.
As a vision of the future, Houellebecq’s novel is of little interest. As science fiction, it is unsatisfying. To imagine, given the changes in electronics during just the past decade, that after 24 generations our descendants still will communicate by e-mail run through servers shows a lazy imagination.
The main point of the future scenes is to collaborate with the despairing picture of the present in pointing out the absurdity and corruption of contemporary life in the West, a panorama of spiritual desiccation, excesses of consumerism and celebrity, meaningless sex and heartlessness toward the weak.
Daniel 25, on a futile quest over a ruined Europe, reflects on his future – to “continue, as much as was possible, my obscure existence as an improved monkey” – and it is tempting to see his words as Houellebecq’s dark epigraph on the modern life that amuses and disgusts him so.
Merritt Moseley teaches literature at the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
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The Possibility of An Island
By Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd
Knopf, 352 pages $24.95
