Soumission by Michel Houellebecq

I feel a little sorry for Michel Houellebecq. In recent interviews he doesn’t look well at all. On the 7^th January, the day his new novel, Soumission, was due to appear, the Charlie Hebdo attacks took place. The victims included Bernard Maris, a friend of Houellebecq who had written the book, Houellebecq Economiste which appeared in France last year. To tie in with the release, Charlie Hebdo had devoted that day’s front cover to him. And the subject of the book? – an imagined France of the future governed by an Islamic party. Small wonder he cancelled his promotional tour and adopted a low profile.

Not that it has affected sales. Conceivably the terrible events of that week provided an uncomfortable promotional boost, with print runs exhausted and 120 000 copies flying off the shelves and through the Amazon warehouses. So, now that things have thankfully quietened down, what to make of this latest addition to his often controversial oeuvre?

First of all, like everything he’s done, it very readable. He’s an accomplished stylist and can tell a story, this time within a more literary framework than usual given that his narrator, François, is a university lecturer at the Sorbonne, whose area of expertise is the late 19th century decadent turned Catholic convert, J.K. Huysmans.

Huysmans (who I’ve never read but think I should) becomes an alter ego, in some part like Le Grand Meaulnes – “For all the years of my sad youth, Huysmans remained for me a a companion, a faithful friend”, the book opens – and in another way, like Sartre’s Rollebon, a doppelganger whose hold needs eventually to be relinquished. (Though Huysman’s religious conversion is salient to the plot in an unexpected way.)

François is the typical Houellebecq protagonist, a solitary, something of a depressive who nevertheless seems to enjoy a series of liaisons with a variety of young students.

 There is the usual ration of graphic  sex scenes, and the usual pessimism about the possibility of fulfilling or lasting relationships. Against this background, he presents us with a scenario where a moderate Islamic party, La Fraternité musulmane has grown, by 2022, to be one of the largest in France, challenged only by the Front National. As the elections approach, polling stations are attacked by armed gangs, his latest girlfriend escapes to Israel as Jews decide to abandon France, and he leaves for a journey of escape from Paris with no destination in mind.

This takes him to Martel in the Lot where he watches events unfold until order is restored, the Fraternité musulmane come to power and a new order is established. A chance meeting with a Péguy-quoting ex-secret service man prompts him to visit the nearby ancient pilgrimage site of Rocamadour, with its shrine of the Black Virgin. Verses of Péguy’s mystical vision of a sacred France resonate in his thoughts as he begins his journey. Which sounds, and is, rather contrived. But the contrivance is there to cement the theme of belief, and submission to it, a novel turn for a novelist more noteworthy previously for what Julian Barnes famously termed his ‘insolence’.

Not that insolence is entirely absent though, and François’ visits to Rocamadour and later, in imitation of Huysmans, a monastery, prove disappointing. But they indicate where he is headed, and as the situation calms and a de-laicised France submits to an Islamic government, he finds himself more at home than he might have expected.

I won’t give away any more, but while the tone is less embittered (or insolent) than usual, the tired but serene acceptance of what happens is not that far removed from the imagined science fiction conclusion of La Possibilité d’une île for example. Houllebecq and his not too distant narrators in their depression and their dissatisfaction are never heroic. They do things without passion, conviction or even much sense of agency. Postmodern to that extent, they nonetheless remain too clever, too in touch with older solider narratives not to present a sometimes viciously ironic, nakedly honest perspective on the way things are. Small wonder he isn’t looking too well.