French novelist Michel Houellebecq has recently caused a stir in the UK with the English publication of his novel Platform in which a travel agency specializing in sex tours to Thailand is enthusiastically described. We will review this as soon as it arrives in Taiwan. Meanwhile, this important earlier novel is selling well at FNAC outlets in Taipei, as is, apparently, the French edition of Platform.
The pages of Atomised alternate between near-impenetrable accounts of the latest discoveries in astrophysics and descriptions of sexual orgies in "couples' clubs," on nudist beaches, and in New Age hideaways in the south of France.
Behind the novel lies a thesis. A huge shift took place, the author argues, in the early 1970s. Before that we had a culture of romantic love, marriage, and the avoidance of any fear of death by belief in an afterlife. Now we have a situation characterized by temporary relationships or emotionless sexual encounters, with nothing to console us as death approaches. Houellebecq sees this as a massive change, equal in importance to the birth of Christianity, or the Scientific Revolution.
His portrayal of the world of modern France is chilling, even terrifying. It's a world where women are alone once their sexual allure fades, social contact is minimal, and few children have fathers (but biology doesn't recognize the idea of paternal love, he claims).
For men, too, life becomes increasingly empty. In this world of dazzling white shopping malls, towering apartment blocks, Internet chat rooms, and a wistfully beautiful -- but empty -- countryside, the future holds nothing except death, now seen simply as physical obliteration.
The young are displayed as understanding the new situation early. They enter the sexual world immediately, at puberty. In one scene a teacher called Bruno masturbates in wild frustration behind his desk as he watches two 13-year-old students feeling each other's bodies while sharing a book in his classroom. After school they use the Durex-dispensing machine quite openly in front of him, and he goes off home to immerse himself in alcohol, but not before exhibiting himself to a young girl in a spell of after-hours private tuition.
Bruno has a half brother, Miles. Both are the offspring of parents who embraced the 1960s sexual revolution, and, in Houellebecq's view, both are traumatized as a result. Miles reacts by becoming a recluse, researching at the frontiers of molecular biology, and ends up making a discovery that will allow humans to control evolution, including their own, in an EU-financed laboratory in remote western Ireland.
What both brothers lack is an ability to create loving relationships. But there's no turning back the clock. So -- is there a route out of this situation? Atomised suggests some possibilities -- Tibetan Buddhism, perhaps, or the mystical world represented by the ancient Irish illustrated manuscript The Book of Kells. But for the time being we are stuck with the stark, shadowless world of modern sexuality, and everything that follows from it.
This is not a very accomplished novel in the traditional sense. In places it feels as pasted together and haphazard (and as pornographic) as William Burrough's The Naked Lunch. Elsewhere it's more like an annotated tract. It's essentially a meditation on sex and death, with an appended vision of genetic engineering.
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