RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/02/16/houellebecqs-annihilation-an-unlikely-antidote-to-nihilism/

“French master Michel Houellebecq has said that his latest novel, Annihilation, will be his last. If that does prove to be true, his departure will deprive us of a rare literary voi

There is simply no one quite like Houellebecq. Through his novels he is able to explore the mood of the times, our spiritual malaise, in a way few other writers can. Take his last great succès de scandale – his 2015 novel, Submission. It dramatised the self-induced decline of the West and the rise of Islamism. And it did so by convincingly presenting the seemingly impossible – an Islamist political party assuming governmental power in France – as something entirely predictable and chillingly banal. He painted a picture of a political and cultural elite all too eager to collaborate with and ultimately submit to an Islamist regime.

Submission quickly acquired a tragic poignancy. On 7 January 2015, the exact day the novel was due to be published in France, two French-born Islamist gunmen massacred the staff of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on the grounds it had insulted Islam. Houellebecq suspended all promotional activities and left Paris to lie low.

At the same time, in an echo of the themes of Submission, too few among the French political class were willing to stand up for free speech, a fundamental principle of Western liberal democracies. Instead, they criticised Charlie Hebdo for its mockery of Islam. French prime minister Manuel Valls denounced ‘hatred’ and ‘intolerance’ towards Islam and Muslims. Tellingly, he insisted that ‘France is not Michel Houellebecq’.

We’re now a decade on from the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Houellebecq’s Anéantir, originally published in January 2022, was finally translated into English and published as Annihilation in late 2024.

This delay in publishing the translation is striking. Houellebecq’s previous novel, Serotonin, was published in France in January 2019 and the English translation appeared just months later. Contractual difficulties reportedly played a role in the delay of Annihilation. But it’s hard not to suspect that the increasing provincialisation of the Anglosphere played a role, too. In the 1950s and 1960s, the films of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, or the novels of Françoise Sagan and Marguerite Duras, were part of the culture here as well as in France. Today, the latest French novels or films barely register in the English-speaking world.

Yet Annihilation is here nonetheless. And it doesn’t disappoint. Themes of alienation and spiritual disillusionment, common to much of Houellebecq’s work, jostle for our attention once again. And he offers a particularly pointed critique of the nihilistic culture around assisted dying and euthanasia, which will surely resonate for his British readers right now.

At one level, Annihilation is a political thriller, much as Submission was. The protagonist, Paul, is a typical Houellebecq anti-hero. He’s a cynical, high-flying civil servant languishing in a loveless marriage to Prudence. He’s also a special adviser to ambitious finance minister, Bruno Juge, who’s about to be made a candidate for the presidency. It’s a bid to keep the seat warm for a return to the presidency by Emmanuel Macron, though the latter is never actually named. To do so, Bruno will have to see off the challenge of a rising National Rally, with its young and presentable candidate for the top job.

At the same time, there is a mysterious threat to global security. An unknown group, specialising in deepfakes and audacious terror attacks, is causing consternation around the world. It carries out strikes against a Chinese shipping container, a migrant boat and a Houellebecquian version of Davos.

If this sounds like a pulsating thriller, that would be misleading. The narrative style is generally one of cool detachment. The political thriller sub-plot quickly gives way to more intimate and universal narrative themes, of love and death, and the possibility of meaning in a thoroughly disenchanted world.

Paul’s father, Édouard, has a stroke and seems destined to die miserably in a care home. That is until his deeply religious sister, Cécile, together with her unemployed husband, Hervé, contact some of the latter’s old friends from a radical underground Catholic organisation. They spring Édouard from the clinic and the indignities of a state care system, and return him to his holiday home in the idyllic Beaujolais region.

There we read of Édouard passing his days contemplating nature through a glass brightly. In one elegiac passage Paul and Édouard confront the gathering darkness: ‘They were contemplating the landscape which was now, in the rays of the setting sun, supernaturally beautiful… The sunset was not a farewell, the night would be brief and would lead to an absolute dawn.’

Houellebecq’s trademark pessimism and anti-Enlightenment sentiments are still to be found in Annihilation. But they are now leavened by the loving and practical Catholicism embodied in the character of Cécile, and, even more surprisingly, by the possibilities of marital love.

This is surprising. Houellebecq has long been criticised for reducing love and relationships to little more than pornography. This in the main was driven by Houellebecq’s ruthless demystification of the 1960s sexual revolution. But in Annihilation, Houellebecq starts to find something close to transcendence in the unexpected rejuvenation of Paul and his partner Prudence’s apparently long-dead marriage.

It’s quite the turn-around. Houellebecq, this most Dostoyevskian of modern writers, who started a literary review called Karamazov in the 1970s, has seemingly discovered the joys of marital love.

If Annihilation really is Houellebecq’s last novel, then this image of human connection in the midst of death and societal decay is a parting gift to be long savoured.

Neil McCarthy is a teacher and writer based in Dublin.