Annihilation
by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Shaun Whiteside
Picador, £11

FRENCH master in the art of dissing everyone, Michel Houellebecq has written his longest book and claims it will be his last.

Published in France in 2022, Annihilation has taken a while to emerge in English. It reads somewhat like a Covid project — that lockdown feel of ennui, aimless and boring for long, long passages is there.

Approaching his retirement, Shakespeare imagined every third thought being of death. For Houellebecq, now 68, every three pages or so gets animated by thoughts of sex.

Sex is a keyword in Houellebecq’s bestseller branding: often provocatively pornographic, usually at women’s expense. Euronews.com reports Annihilation’s French sales were overwhelmingly to men.

The recent revelations of the Gisele Pelicot mass rape trial cast a retroactive toxicity onto Houellebecq’s misogyny; a Monsieur Tout-Le-Monde vibe dogs the writer’s voice.

Set in 2027, Annihilation begins as a cybercrime-terrorist thriller involving the French finance minister, Bruno Judge, who seems to be self-isolating in his ministry offices, and his confidant, bureaucrat Paul Raison.

Strange incomings of cyber intelligence suggest either far-right Satanic cults, eco activists, Catholic fundamentalists, far-left perpetrators, or strategic alliances thereof, are to blame. On the surface, Annihilation’s overarching theme might be summed up: life is silly and then you die.

The thriller-themed silliness soon peters out, though, replaced by a focus on elderly palliative care — again a lurking ghost of lockdown. In a context of neoliberal cost-cutting, euthanasia is presented as class war.

Paul and his siblings plan to extract their brain-damaged father: “He blinked to say yes,” Paul’s sister Cecile notes, “It was amazing … how far one could go in the conversation using just yes or no.” 

The image of naked senile-dementia patients lost in hospital corridors, shit running down their legs, is stark. But Annihilation’s melange of happenings is not what the book is up to.

Combing the content for the underscoring, the book’s major theme is nihilism — nothingness like a depth charge at the heart of a failing society, leaving a vacuum for what is to come.

Houellebecq is a litmus test in France’s roiling hostilities. “French people in general were sad,” Maryse, a care-worker immigrant from Benin understatingly notes.

Delivered in quantity, a light marinade of pouty dialectics douses the book. The comedy is in the pace of associations, serious/grave to random/trivial. On France’s failing nationhood, history, politics, on “dim-witted, conciliatory philosophers,” religions, paganisms, over-or-underpopulation, and the liberating sexual boon of a paid-off mortgage, there is bite, the occasional satiric shredding.

A set-piece halfway through is ripe for reciting down the pub: “The human world seemed to him to be made up of little balls of egoistic shit, unconnected and unrelated to one another, and sometimes these balls grew agitated and copulated in their own way, each in its own register, leading in turn to tiny new balls of shit…”

Other body parts function to describe the malaise of declining French society — the father’s minimally conscious brain; Paul’s attention-seeking penis — although only ever depicted via the satisfied responses of docile women; Paul’s malignant tongue. The satirist’s worst fear is glimpsed when, post-radiotherapy, Paul feels a wave of nausea, “but only threw up a bit of acrid bile.”

A pass-the-parcel presidency is depicted occupying the ruling political class as the gap between elites and the people “had reached unheard-of levels…” racial hatred was soaring in Europe, and that wasn’t going to be sorted out anytime soon” — the election campaign fixer for the Establishment candidate has her finger on the pulse.

Bruno, Paul’s finance minister boss, has a slow trajectory through the novel, from a competent “technician who knew his files,” to the future political contender-in-chief.

The many lengthy passages involving late-night blah-blah between the two men begin to cohere along with the Satanism memes planted earlier — silliness is drawn through layers of enlightenment philosophising to a shockingly rational recognition in a casual reference to Nazism: seen in this historical reality, nihilism equals Satan.

At the cold heart of the book, fascism is revealed lodged in the technocrat’s calm acknowledgement that “violence is the engine of history.” The terrorist attacks have worked to the advantage of the ruling elite: “electorally it’s perfect,” Bruno confirms. A high-status commemoration for multiple lives lost gets staged as a comms triumph, “even Israel will be there.”

The last hundred pages of Annihilation take a more lyrical turn towards death in winter. Hosted by somewhat phlegmatic bureaucrat Paul, the cyber-fate of France is forgotten, characters return to their class origins, and even radio and chemotherapies have no dominion over the Houellebecqian little todger.