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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