Michel Houellebecq has been hailed as the most important French writer for a generation. His three novels, Atomized [reviewed Taipei Times Sept. 15, 2002], Platform [reviewed Taipei Times Sept. 29, 2002] and now The Possibility of an Island are unusual in that they combine three literary genres — pornography, science fiction and the novel of ideas. It’s true there were fewer ideas in Platform, which imagined the destruction of a Thai sex-resort by Muslim guerrillas only months before the first of the Bali bombings. But this new novel is again replete with eugenic and other theories, and as such makes claims to being Houellebecq’s most ambitious project to date.
Two narratives alternate. Most extensive is that of Daniel 1, a man spending his time between France and Spain in the early 21st century. A voracious sexual loner whose only real companion is his dog, and a total skeptic about the claims of religion, he nonetheless attends a conference of a New Age cult called the Elohimites on the Spanish island of Lanzarotte. Central to their practices is the recording of members’ DNA with the aim of reincarnation via reproductive cloning. The alternating narratives are by Daniel 1’s cloned descendants, Daniel 24 and then Daniel 25, “neohumans” living 350 years into the future.
Houellebecq is nothing if not a savage satirizer of modern life. To this end he makes Daniel 1 a retired stand-up comic who’s made a fortune with outrageous sketches on topics such as “racism, pedophilia, cannibalism, parricide, acts of torture and barbarism,” and with titles like We Prefer the Palestinian Orgy Sluts. And, in his description of the Elohimite conference, New Age absurdities of every kind are also skewered with farcical abandon with Tibetan mountain horns competing with evocations of Samuel Beckett in a rap video.
Most readers will find the colorful and realistic Daniel 1 narratives more absorbing than the more abstract futuristic sections. I actually read all the former one after another, skipping the others, and then went back and read those set in the future. And indeed this is probably how Houellebecq wrote the book, constructing two narratives and then inter-splicing them to give the illusion of one commenting on the other.
This novel, Houellebecq’s best to date, attracts through its highly intelligent ability to shock. It’s characterized by gross anti-political-correctness diatribes and punchy aphorisms, apparently serious speculation on human biology, extremely graphic sex lacking in romance of any kind, characters who are either transparently selfish or else lonely intellectuals (or both), unabashed racism, and people viewed simply as erotic objects, both by others and by themselves.
Houellebecq’s books are certainly not novels in the tradition of Tolstoy and Balzac whose stories contain rounded characters that interact and hold conversations, which illustrate their personalities in depth. None of the traditional literary themes — expiation of guilt, forgiveness, heroism, devotion — are present either. Instead, they’re the fantasies of one individual, someone who in his darker moods considers human beings to consist merely of digestive tubes with pleasure-giving genitalia attached. Indeed, in the view of some commentators, Houellebecq is himself a representative of the malaise he describes, alienated from all humane values, lonely, self-obsessed, and only capable of finding true friendship with animals. But much the same was true of Jonathan Swift.
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