Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (20 page)

Our Maecenas also got huffy, and announced the following
year that the Prix Novembre would be suspended for twelve months, so that we could discuss its future direction. Most jury members thought that this was unnecessary, not to say insolent; we decamped to a new sponsor and renamed ourselves the Prix Décembre. Meanwhile, the novel was translated into English as
Atomised
, and anglophones became aware of what Schneidermann had told me: its author was
médiatique
by being
anti-médiatique
. The literary world is one of the easiest in which to acquire a bad-boy reputation; and Houellebecq duly obliged. When the (female) profiler from the
Observer
visited him, he got catatonically drunk, collapsed face down into his dinner, and told her he’d only answer further questions if she slept with him. Houellebecq’s wife was also enlisted, posing for the photographer in her underwear and offering a loyal quote of treasurable quality. ‘Michel’s not depressed,’ she told the interviewer. ‘It’s the world that’s depressing.’

If Houellebecq is, on the evidence of
Atomised
, the most potentially weighty French novelist to emerge since Tournier (and the wait has been long, and therefore overpraise understandable), his third novel,
Platform
, opens with a nod in an earlier direction. No French writer would begin a novel ‘Father died last year’ without specifically invoking Camus’
The Outsider
. Houellebecq’s narrator is called Renault, perhaps hinting that such a man has become a mere cog in a mechanised society; but the name also chimes with Meursault, Camus’ narrator. And for a clincher: Renault’s father has been sleeping with his North African cleaner, Aïcha, whose brother beats the old man to death. When the son is brought face to face with his father’s murderer, he reflects: ‘If I had a gun, I would have shot without a second thought. Killing that little shit … seemed to me a morally neutral act.’ Cut to Meursault’s gunning-down of the Arab on the beach in Algiers, and to his similar moral indifference to the act.

But in the sixty years that lie between
The Outsider
and
Platform
, alienation and anomie have moved on. So have
expressions of disrespect for the parent. As a schoolboy in the 1960s, I found Meursault’s transgressive opening words – ‘Mother died today. Or perhaps yesterday, I don’t know’ – registering like a slap (and I wasn’t a pious son either). Nowadays, you have to slap harder:

Houellebecq ups the ante; but it’s also his trademark to follow the coffinside vituperation with the wry ‘Well, I was a bit tense’.
Atomised
was hard to summarise (it’s about the third ‘metaphysical mutation’ of the last two thousand years, that of molecular biology, which will see cloning put an end to the fear of death and the miseries of genetic individualism …) without making it sound heavy; on the page, there was a satirical glee to its denunciations, drollery in the dystopia.

Platform
begins very much in the mode of
Atomised
, with a radically detached male narrator, a child of the information age, excoriating the falseness of the world. He boasts the ‘disinterested attitude appropriate to an accounts manager’ towards almost everything. He is emotionally mute; socially too, and thus barely able to converse with Aïcha. When she begins criticising Islam, he more or less agrees, though he isn’t entirely hard-line about it: ‘Intellectually, I could manage to feel a certain attraction to Muslim vaginas.’

Anyone not yet offended? But Houellebecq, or rather ‘Michel’ as his narrator is elidingly called, has barely started. Snorting contempt is coming the way of the following: Frederick Forsyth and John Grisham; Jacques Chirac; the
Guide du Routard
(a French equivalent of the Rough Guides); package tourists; France (‘a sinister country, utterly sinister and bureaucratic’); the Chinese; the ‘bunch of morons’ who ‘died for the sake of democracy’ on Omaha Beach; most men; most women; children; the unattractive; the old; the West; Muslims; the French channel TV5; Muslims again; most artists; Muslims yet again; and finally, frequently, the narrator himself.

What does Michel approve of? Peep shows, massage parlours, pornography, Thai prostitutes, alcohol, Viagra (which helps you overcome the effects of the alcohol), cigarettes, non-white women, masturbation, lesbianism, troilism, Agatha Christie, double penetration, fellatio, sex tourism and women’s underwear. You might have spotted an odd one out there. Frederick Forsyth may be a ‘halfwit’, while John Grisham’s books are only good for wanking into: ‘I ejaculated between two pages with a groan of satisfaction. They were going to stick together; didn’t matter, it wasn’t the kind of book you read twice.’ But Agatha Christie receives two pages of adulation, mainly for her novel
The Hollow
, in which she makes clear that she understands the ‘sin of despair’. This is the ‘sin of cutting yourself off from all warm and living human contacts’; which is, of course, the sin of Michel. ‘It is in our relations with other people’, he remarks, ‘that we gain a sense of ourselves; it’s that, pretty much, that makes relations with other people unbearable.’ Further: ‘Giving up on life is the easiest thing to do’; and ‘Anything can happen in life, especially nothing.’

The sin of despair is compounded when the sufferer is a hedonist.
Platform
is largely concerned with tourism, sex and the combination of the two. Tourism is currently the biggest single industry on the planet, a pure locus of supply and deliberately massaged demand. One key appeal for the novelist is tourism’s psychology: not least the central, Flaubertian irony whereby anticipation and remembrance (the brochure’s false promise of happiness, the holiday snap’s grinning lie) often
prove more vivid and reliable than the moment itself. One key danger for the novelist – not always avoided here – is that of easy satire: tourists make soft targets not just for terrorists.

Houellebecq sends Michel off on a sun-and-sex vacation; his largely crass companions include the acceptable, indeed positively attractive, Valérie, who works for the travel company. Much of the immediate plot turns on her attempts and those of her colleague Jean-Yves to revive an ailing branch of the corporation they work for. This is all adequately done, though Houellebecq’s strengths and interests as a writer are not particularly those of traditional narrative. His approach to a scene, and a theme, often remind me of a joke long current in Euro circles. A British delegate to some EU committee outlines his country’s proposals, which, being British, are typically pragmatic, sensible and detailed. The French delegate reflects noddingly on them for a considerable period of time, before delivering judgement: ‘Well, I can see the plan will work in practice, but will it work in theory?’

Thus the primary, obvious link between sex and tourism is the carnal, interpersonal (and impersonal) one. But just as important for Houellebecq is to find the theoretical connection. Which he does: both sex and tourism exemplify the free market at its most free. Sex has always appeared capitalistic to Houellebecq. Here is his formulation from his first novel,
Whatever
:

This kind of swift, audacious linkage is Houellebecq at his best; he loves nothing more than working over what in
Atomised
he called ‘the North American libidinal-hedonist option’. But his actual writing about sex, in
Platform
, is curiously both pornographic and sentimental. Pornographic in the sense of taking all its moves and images from pornography; who put what where and moved it whither until a convulsive spurt-’n’-groan; also, written like pornography of a decent, middle-ranking kind. Sentimental in that the novel’s really nice, straightforward characters are Oriental masseuses and prostitutes, who are presented without flaws, diseases, pimps, addictions or hang-ups. Pornographic
and
sentimental in that nothing ever goes wrong with the sexual act: pneumatic bliss is always obtained, no one ever says No or Stop or even Wait, and you just have to beckon at a non-white-skinned maid on the hotel terrace for her to pop into the room, quickly reveal she is braless, and slide seamlessly into a threesome. Houellebecq sees through everything in the world except commercial sex, which he describes – perhaps appropriately – like one who believes every word and picture of a holiday brochure.

And then there is love. ‘I really love women,’ Michel tells us on the opening page. Later, he elaborates: ‘My enthusiasm for pussy’ is one of ‘my few remaining recognisable, fully human qualities’. Despite ‘loving women’, Michel pointedly never refers to his mother. And when this depressed, old-at-forty sex tourist gradually finds himself becoming involved with Valérie, you wonder how Houellebecq will handle it. After all, it is a piece of literary insolence to make such a character fall in love in the first place. So how is love different for Michel from commercial sex? Happily, not too much. Valérie, though at first appearing rather dowdy and browbeaten, turns out to have wonderful breasts; she is also as good in bed
as Thai prostitutes; and she doesn’t just go along with threesomes, she instigates them. She is by nature docile; yet she holds down a good job and is very well paid; like him she scorns designer clothes. And that’s about it, really. They don’t do any of that old stuff like talking about feelings, or thinking about them; they don’t go out much together, though he does take her to a wife-swap bar and an S & M club. He does a spot of cooking; she is often so tired from work that it isn’t until the next morning that she can give him a blow job. This is not so much insolent as fictionally disappointing. Oh, and Valérie has to die, of course, just when she has found happiness and the couple have decided to live on a paradise island. The set-up, and execution, of this would have been improved upon by Grisham or Forsyth.

Why, to go back to the start, does Michel hate his father so? This is one question a normally inquisitive reader might ask after that coffinside denunciation. What do we learn of this ‘old bastard’, this ‘clever cunt’, this ‘moron in shorts’, this ‘hideously representative element’ of the twentieth century? That he was seventy when he died, that Aïcha was ‘very fond’ of him, that he exercised a lot and owned a Toyota Land Cruiser. Hardly grounds enough, you might think. But we also learn, further on, that this monster had once been struck down by a sudden, inexplicable depression. ‘His mountaineering friends stood around awkwardly, powerless in the face of the disease. The reason he played so much sport, he once told me, was to stupefy himself, to stop himself thinking.’ This is all new (we hadn’t been told before that the father was a mountaineer); and you might think, since Michel is himself depressed, that it might have been grounds for sympathy. But this is all we get, and the father swiftly disappears from the narrative, as he does from Michel’s thoughts.

Within the novel, the filial hatred is just an inexplicable given. However, book chat (not always to be despised) turns up an interview Houellebecq gave to
Lire
magazine a few
years ago. The novelist’s parents abandoned him when he was five, leaving him in the care of a grandmother. ‘My father’, says Houellebecq, ‘developed early on a sense of excessive guilt. He once told me the strangest thing: that he devoted himself to intense physical activity so much because it stopped him thinking. He was a mountain guide.’

No reason why this strange confession shouldn’t be used by a fiction writer; but if it is to work, it needs to be supported fictionally. In
Platform
the slippage between ‘Michel R’ and Michel H is more serious than this little bit of autobiographical leaching might suggest. There are problems with the narrative, officially a first-person account by Michel R, but one which dodges into the third person if it needs to tell us what only Michel H can know. (There is even an incompetent moment when Michel R gives us his judgement on a character he hasn’t yet met.) Within Michel himself, there is also some curious slippage. Thus he sets off on holiday with ‘two American best-sellers that I’d bought pretty much at random at the airport’ (this despite feeling
de haut en bas
about Forsyth and Grisham); he also has the
Guide du Routard
. Fair enough for a sex tourist, you might think. Later, a bit surprisingly, he panics at the thought of having nothing to read. Later still, when back home, he turns out to be an assiduous reader of Auguste Comte and Milan Kundera; he also quotes confidently from Kant, Schopenhauer and social theoreticians. Is this credibly the same character, or someone shifting to meet the needs of the moment?

This sense of Houellebecq being a clever man who is a less than clever novelist obtrudes most in the novel’s dealings with Islam. Structurally, the function of what Michel calls ‘the absurd religion’ appears to be to deliver, at the end, an extreme and murderous disapproval of the happy sex tourists. Its running presence, however, consists in a trio of outbursts. First from Aïcha, who launches unasked into a denunciation of her Mecca-stupefied father and her useless brothers: ‘They get
blind drunk on pastis and all the while they strut around like the guardians of the one true faith, and they treat me like a slut because I prefer to go out and work rather than marry some stupid bastard like them.’ Next there is the Egyptian once encountered by Michel in the Valley of the Kings, an immensely cultivated and intelligent genetic engineer, for whom Muslims are ‘the losers of the Sahara’ and Islam a religion born among ‘filthy Bedouins’ who did nothing but ‘bugger their camels’. Then there is the Jordanian banker met in Bangkok, who in the course of general denunciation points out that the sexual paradise promised to Islamic martyrs is much more cheaply obtainable in any hotel massage parlour. Extraordinary that three casual meetings on three different continents should turn up three vociferous Arab Islam-despisers who disappear from the narrative immediately after their work is done. This isn’t so much an author with his thumb on the scales as one clambering into the weighing pan and doing a tap dance. (Book-chat parenthesis: Houellebecq told
Lire
magazine that his mother had become a Muslim, adding, ‘I can’t bear Islam.’)