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Waiting for the end
It finally happens in Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation.
After 526 pages
Greg Klein | February 1, 2025
Taunting clues expressing age-old evil come
from almost transcendentally high-tech terrorists.
Nearness to death gives Paul Raison much to contemplate about survival, reproduction, revival and rebirth. Meanwhile comfortable circumstances—at least much more comfortable than could realistically be expected—give him a sense of detachment from the puzzles, mysteries, dreams and portents that intrude on his bourgeois life. Another Michel Houellebecq novel gives us another rendition of the Houellebecq character undergoing typically Houellebecqian malaise.
Decoding mystery becomes urgent as French security spooks try to decipher macabre messages preceding a new wave of terror attacks. Satanist imagery and maybe the targets hint at a possibly primitivist ideology, although carried out with the greatest technical sophistication. Raison comes into contact with people and ideas connected to Catholics, Wiccans, sorcerers, Salafists, Identitarians, Le Pen’s National Rally and mainstream politicians, as well as would-be revolutionaries who think the world went wrong with Christianity or with agriculture.
Raison’s personal circle covers a range of beliefs. His father considered his military and intelligence career to have furthered Western survival. His mother died at Notre-Dame d’Amiens, without subtlety, in a fall while restoring sculptured angels. His sister’s a devout Catholic married to an Identitarian; one of their daughters is a hooker who rejuvenates Raison with a €400 blow job. (Of course: This is a Houellebecq novel.) His brother, like their mother considered a dead soul who restores Medieval art, is a weakling married to a monster; he comes close to starting a new life with an African girlfriend before dying childless (except for a creation of ideological malice that’s biologically not his). Raison’s childless himself, but not with regret. Scorning the idea that reproduction cheats death, he believes children hasten the demise of parents, bringing about a “derisory parody of actual survival.”
Raison enjoys a privileged job as confidante to a government minister who’s given up on his two ineffectual and probably non-reproductive sons. His vision of renewal comprises a glorious age of French industrial and technological progress that he’d bring about in his future “post democracy” presidency. That is, if Satanic terrorists don’t first lop off his head.
These themes recur almost constantly as people live, die or await death. As for Raison, he eventually reunites with his long-estranged wife, a Wiccan whose beliefs—particularly reincarnation—come to dominate his inescapable thoughts of death.
The new interest brings relief to Raison’s earlier state. At one point despondent for lack of love, he considers people nothing more than “little balls of egoistic shit” that copulate with other balls of egoistic shit to beget more balls of egoistic shit except, “aware of their mutual stench,” those balls of egoistic shit now reproduce so rarely that “an extinction of the human race seemed imaginable.” Reflecting on the latest attack, he thinks, “If the terrorists’ goal was to annihilate the world as he knew it, to annihilate the modern world, he couldn’t entirely blame them.”
At other times the thought of impermanence troubles Raison. His dentist’s retirement bothers him disproportionately. The search for a replacement takes him to Villejuif, a once largely Jewish suburb that’s now a breeding ground for some of France’s most vicious Muslim terrorists. But it’s there, ironically, that Raison’s directed to the medical care necessary for any chance of survival.
As if representing “the tribulations of Christianity in western Europe,”
Notre-Dame-de-la-Nativité de Bercy was repeatedly restored or rebuilt
and now seems deserted most of the time. Visits to the church activate
Raison’s agnostic confusion.
Strangely bedevilling his thoughts is a preoccupation that’s set off by five-sided occult symbols: “The distribution of prime numbers had driven quite a few people mad throughout Western history.” Most of the story takes place in 2027, a “monstrous and unnatural” number, and a year of great portent.
Despite all the fin-de-siècle uncertainty, Raison lives a privileged existence. Money’s never a problem as he takes unlimited time off work, benefits from a team of elite medical specialists almost at his beck and call (in a country where some regions have African-level health care) and reunites with a wife who lives for absolutely nothing but his love. A petty grievance against budget hotels comes up too often.
Some of the story will be familiar to Houellebecq readers. As in The Elementary Particles, the protagonist’s brother suffers horrendous cruelty at school. Sex scenes read like a technical manual written by Cormac McCarthy. Raison’s prick seems to be a separate entity with a will of its own. Self-indulgent asides and mini-essays can be trite (as in remarks about some rock star’s stage antics) or refreshing (“he remembered a particularly idiotic passage in For Whom the Bell Tolls”). Always looming, at least in the background, is a doomed civilization.
Houellebecq got this right only in his 2015 novel Submission. Like his other works, Annihilation is variously laborious and captivating, but overall disappointing. Often praised as France’s most important writer, Houellebecq has a reputation for chronicling Western decline. His stature might be symptomatic.