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`If we couldn't have sex from time to time, what would life be?'

By Bradley Winterton
CONTRIBUTING REPORTER
Sunday, Sep 29, 2002, Page 18

Platform By Michel Houellebecq 362 pages Available from FNAC

This flamboyantly pornographic, intellectually provocative, and for the most part enjoyable book comes hot on the heels of the same author's sprawling semi-fictional tract Atomised (reviewed here on Sept. 15). It's not as mentally taxing as parts of the earlier book were, but instead is a largely conventional novel, albeit one with some strikingly outrageous ingredients.

What Michel Houellebecq believes, in a nutshell, is that life is so irredeemably awful that endless copulation is the only occupation a genuinely intelligent person could ever consider worth pursuing.

"A source of permanent, accessible pleasure, our genitals exist," he writes. "The god who created our misfortune, who made us short-lived, vain and cruel, has also provided this form of meager compensation. If we couldn't have sex from time to time, what would life be?"

It's necessary to sample the style to understand how the mixture of erotic directness, general outspokenness, and a willingness to embrace flagrantly illiberal opinions, combine to create the casually shocking tone. The narrator ends up in Thailand's Pattaya. Strangely, given his predilection for frequent bouts with Thai sex workers, he appears not to like it overmuch.

"There is nothing lower than Pattaya," he writes. "It is a sort of cesspit, the ultimate sewer where the sundry waste of Western neurosis winds up. Whether you're homosexual, heterosexual, or both, Pattaya is the last-chance saloon, the one beyond which you might as well give up on desire."

He lists "Austrian dykes with piercings," Dutch dropouts, rappers in baseball caps, cyberpunks with red hair, retired Germans "their thick hands on the thighs of their young companions," Russians who "dress like rednecks and behave like gangsters," and the French -- "mostly a crowd of straight, ex-colonial, ex-army thugs."

"Pot-bellied, moustachioed German pederasts minced around in their flowery shirts," he goes on, and Russian teenage girls "who had attained a pinnacle of sluttishness, squirmed as they listened to their ghetto-blaster."

When a Frenchman writes like this about his fellow Europeans, what will he think of the rest of the world? Not much. He has his say about Africans (unrepeatable), Muslims in general (also unrepeatable, and it goes on for four pages), and Hong Kong Chinese ("recognisable by their filthy manners"). As for Anglo-Saxons, he refers caustically to several transatlantic best-selling novels, and makes a joke about one of them that is unfortunately too obscene to relate here.

The novel's story is as follows. Having inherited money following the death of his father, the narrator, Michel, goes on a trip to Thailand. While there he experiences commercial sex, but back in Paris starts a relationship with a 28-year-old French woman from the tour. She works in the travel business, and also happens to be bisexual (but is disgusted by a graphically described Paris S&M club Michel takes her to).

They go together to Cuba to investigate the lack of success of some of her company's hotels (an opportunity for asides on communism, with comments on fuel shortages, lack of spare parts, and the Cubans' lassitude and lack of motivation generally). While there, Michel comes up with the idea of institutionalized sex tourism. Many people pursued it, he argues, but travel companies mostly held back from selling the idea. They wouldn't need to employ the prostitutes, he suggests, merely allow them to work freely in their resorts.

The idea is launched on the coast of Thailand's Krabi province and is a huge success. The project is wrecked, however, when Muslim guerrillas assault the site, killing large numbers of the Europeans and Thais involved. Michel consequently resigns from his job in France and goes to live in Thailand on a permanent basis.

There's no doubt whatever that Houellebecq endorses Michel's views. Much of the Third World is poor and yet retains the ability to give sexual pleasure in a guilt-free fashion, he argues. Seeing that the West is generally rich, jaded and sexually unhappy, nothing could be more natural than that it should pay for therapeutic sex in the poorer countries of Asia, to the benefit of all concerned. (The inconvenient problem posed by the AIDS pandemic is glossed over.)

France, he considers, would be a prosperous, mildly socialist bore if it were not for the fact that some of its city areas are too dangerous to go out in. "We paused briefly for lunch," he writes at one point. "At that very moment, two teenagers from the Courtilieres housing estate were smashing in a sixty-year-old woman's head with a baseball bat. I ordered maquerau au vin blanc to start."

This may sound uncaring, but in fact Houellebecq's character comes across instead as wounded and plaintive, but refusing to lie down and die. He challenges received orthodoxies, not only because he considers them philosophically amateurish, but also because he is by nature a loner and a quintessential outsider.

"For the West," he writes, "I do not feel hatred; at most I feel a great contempt. I know only that every single one of us reeks of selfishness, masochism and death. We have created a system in which it has simply become impossible to live; and what's more, we continue to export it."

Houellebecq has other provocative ideas. One character asserts that the young are so attractive that "in certain circumstances he found it difficult to imagine how -- and more especially why -- incest might be avoided." Another claim is that, once social constraints have been cast aside, men enjoy massacring their fellows. There are many more, none likely to appeal to humanitarians, radicals, or believers in the blessings bestowed by modern Western societies.

At the book's conclusion the narrator rents a room in Pattaya for around US$100 a month with air-con, refrigerator, shower, bed and bits of furniture, buys some reams of A4 paper, and in six months completes this book. The account has all the appearance of being autobiographical. If so, the last time you were in Pattaya and saw someone drinking an espresso and alternately reading the philosopher Auguste Comte and leafing through pornography, it could well have been Houellebecq.

He's now reportedly found love and is living in Ireland where no doubt he is planning further assaults on conventional Western pieties for our amusement and possible illumination.
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