FICTION
Annihilation
Michel Houellebecq
Picador, $34.99

Hold each other close as the world falls apart. So says Michel Houellebecq in his final novel, Annihilation.

When approaching the work of a writer as famous as Houellebecq, the reading experience is informed by everything he has written — and that has been written about him. The accepted narrative is that Houellebecq, whose books are populated by depressed and transgressive men seeking comfort in sex and disaffection, is a nihilist.

I’ve never interpreted Houellebecq as a nihilist. His commitment to a series of novels that suggest humanity has brought about its own irrelevance, his belief that the world would be better off without us, even the invectives — they’re a type of warped care for the world. How else to explain his oeuvre, his public performativity, his perseverance? Certainly not with a nihilist’s yawn and shrug.

He’s polarised readers for blunt portrayals of smutty sex, hideous men who see women as no more than body parts, and incendiary takes on immigration, the Islamic faith, national preservation. In his early career, his eloquent ugliness felt defiant; here was an iconoclast who had dragged himself out of the sewers of late capitalism to show us the dirty side of our natures.

But Annihilation reminds us it’s been a long time since The Elementary Particles (published in Australia as Atomised), his international breakthrough novel about two lonely half-brothers, one of whom engineers a cloning method that renders human reproduction obsolete. In the last decade, Houellebecq’s work has taken a political turn, with the likes of Submission imagining a future France under Islamic Law and Serotonin depicting an agrarian uprising from marginalised farmers.

This political occupation becomes the dominant one for Annihilation, but its commitment to an imagined future is equivocal. The novel has two crises that affect its protagonist, a political advisor named Paul Raison. The first is a series of distressing but anonymous cyber-attacks that threaten to sabotage the 2027 French presidential election. Working for the Minister of the Economy and Finance, Paul spends his days consulting cryptographers, the Secret Service, and other politicians in the quest of tracing the source and motives of the cyber-terrorists.

So ostensibly Annihilation is a political techno-thriller, but this plotline recedes from focus when Paul’s father Edouard has a stroke and is left in a minimally conscious state. A troubled family reunion occurs between Paul and his two siblings, the hyper-religious Cecile and depressed brother Aurlien, while Paul seeks to mend his broken marriage with Prudence.

Paul is the archetypal Houellebecqian protagonist: estranged, middle-class, narcissistic. He’s also boring. In the opening pages, he’s described as “serious, no sense of humour, even quite austere“. To that, we can add: a workaholic, lousy husband, unhealthy, apathetic, emotionally bereft. The novel is long; it meanders.