Anéantir - Michel Houellebecq

If you can get past the undisguised contempt for bourgeois family life and morals and the copious graphic descriptions of sex, you will find that Michel Houellebecq often has something pertinent, premonitory and usually pessimistic to say about the state of the world we are living in. For me he sometimes misses the mark, but when he gets it right - in Plateforme, in Sérotonine - he casts the rest of the conservative French literary world into shade. With its provocative title, his latest Anéantir (Annihilate) is in some respects typical of Houellebecq's cynical view of individuals, family and society, but there is a noticeable change of tone here and some kind of acceptance that the issues he grapples with are far more complicated  and important to deal with than just through his personally tainted perspective.

It takes a while and a few dead-end plot developments for Anéantir to find its focus and purpose - which I guess is probably true to life itself. The story is set in the near future, in 2026 where France is now a new economic power, although in all other respects Anéantir, like all Houellebecq's novels, are contemporary in that they could conceivably take place tomorrow. As a new Presidential campaign is ready to be announced, the French security services, the DGSI (General Directorate for Internal Security) are investigating a new serious potential threat. A group have been posting videos of a type that look so deep fake that it seems impossible to achieve. The latest shows Bruno Juge, the Minister of Economy and Finance and potential candidate for the presidency being decapitated by a guillotine.

No one knows who is behind the video or what their aims are, but if they harness such computing power and skills, they could pose a serious threat to international security, one that scares even the experienced hackers of the DGSI. And indeed, the next message that hits servers all over the world looks more than just a realistic deep fake video, but footage of the actual destruction of a Chinese carrier ship. The immediate thought is that this must be the action of a leftist anti-capitalist terror group targeting international commerce, but there are doubts about their motivations raised by inconsistencies in subsequent actions.

While this initially appears to be another spin on the familiar Houellebecq targets of western decadence  spawning a rise in international terrorism, the attacks turn out to be only an underlying theme which is brought more into focus by Paul Raison, a civil servant and adviser to Bruno Juge, the Minister who has been 'executed' in the video. Paul is around 50 years old, married to Prudence but their marriage is not in a good place. When his father, a prominent figure in the DGSI has a stroke, Paul goes to Lyon to see him in hospital where he remains in a coma and unlikely to recover.

Although he enjoys his work, Paul seems a bit jaded with his personal life, and his father's illness just seems to emphasise everything that is wrong in his marriage and family life. No longer identifying with his favourite childhood movie The Matrix (one of a number of curious references in the book), Paul now looks towards nature documentaries as a way of defining his place in the world and his disdain for other people. One passing reference on a tarantula attacking anything on its vicinity, even its owner or other tarantulas because "it doesn't like any other living being" ("n'aime pas les êtres") is quite revealing. On another occasion he regards humanity as "petites boules de merde égotistes" that will hopefully culminate in their extinction. And if some terrorists want to wipe out (anéantir) the modern world, that is fine with him.

If Serotonin was Houellebecq reaching the end of his own tolerance for living, or writing about a character not unlike himself, Anéantir, which in this context could be translated as a desire for extinction, is like a death wish for the wiping out of all humanity. This was was done to some extent on a more globally catastrophic scale in La Possibilitié d'une ile, but here it's less science-fiction, climate change related and more the inevitable result of a side of humanity that is becoming worryingly prevalent.

"...the increasingly evident distortion between the intentions of men in politics and the real consequences of their action seemed to him unhealthy and even evil, society in any case could no longer continue to function on that basis." Anéantir certainly presents the familiar pessimistic nihilist  Houellebecq outlook on families, on religious fundamentalism, on western decadence, on the state of the world in general, but here (as in Serotonin) he hones in on the deplorable (near-future) state of France, its politics, its journalism, the media and where it meets the real world. And not just the state, but there is equal scorn for the baby boomer generation, middle-class decadence, individual self-importance and self-regard.

So far so Houllebecq, and the notion that we are moving into a post-democracy is a fascinating idea, and maybe a process that is already beginning in a politically populist social media Twitter age. Unfortunately (depending on whether your view of what you want from Houellebecq meets with the author's own intentions for this particular book), none of these ideas are really taken to any conclusion, and to be fair he has already taken them as far as he can go in his previous novels. In some ways then, Anéantir seems to be a summation of Houllebecq's views and ideas so far, but an attempt to steer them in a different direction. Not a more optimistic direction maybe, but perhaps seeking to find something more redemptive in the experience.

Whether he achieves that or not will be down to the individual reader and how they react to the surprising changing fortunes of Paul and the Raison family, who become the main focus of the long 700+ page novel. There is no doubt however that Anéantir is far from satisfactory on a number of levels. It's a bit scattershot, lacking focus and balance and the descriptions of women are also - as ever - problematic, all of them either saintly martyrs or complete bitches towards men, confusing Paul with their otherworldly Catholic and Wicca beliefs. Paul's dreams, which seem like no more than anxiety dreams and sexual urges (of course), are also related as if they are important and have some symbolic or mystical relevance. Houellebecq even seems to entertain mysticism and numerology here as potentially having some bearing on events.

This constant fluctuation between mystical, global scale and individual personal issues feels unbalanced, the book never seeming to retain focus or purpose. The global conspiracy and political part appears to be more exciting and raises those big questions, but in the end it's the smaller personal upheavals, the questions of individual life and death prove to be more touching, moving and meaningful. Despite his own personal disdain for humanity Houellebecq is uncharacteristically generous here, tender even - although it's not as rare in his books as you might think - seeing some redeeming features in the grimmest of situations, even if it may not quite enough to save humanity from eventual annihilation.

Reading notes: Anéantir by Michel Houellebecq is published in France by Flammarion (7th January 2022). Reviewed from hardback edition.