- I've long been a fan of celebrated French author Michel Houellebecq, having read all his novels over the years. He offers a delicious immersion in all things French - politics, history, class, culture, food and wine. And of course sex.
- His latest novel is his longest yet at 525 pages. But it's probably his best. It's about family relationships and the drama of politics. Families are rarely the source of happiness, but politics and work are. Annihilation focuses on parents, siblings, couples, friends, and work colleagues. Relationships are under the microscope. And we're taken inside the political world because a Presidential election is the background to all that's happening on the personal level.
- Houellebecq is a delightful literary show-off and never ceases to drop quotes from noted authors and poets, so we're constantly confronted with challenging, enriching ideas, and wit. ‘…she had probably nodded off over her Anita Brookner’.
- The principal characters are Paul from Finance and his wife Prudence from Treasury, ('They were in complete agreement about value added tax’). They split up eventually, and had not 'fucked' for ten years. (In all Houellebecq's novels couples don’t ‘make love’ or become ‘intimate’ - they ‘fuck’). Paul's boss Bruno, who has been the Minister of Finance, is now a key member of the Presidential candidate's team.
- Houellebecq lobs in plenty of challenging ideas. He loves babyboomers for one. The years 1945-1975 were the best. After the triumph over Nazism, hope, joy and economic opportunity became central. ‘Popular culture production had proved to be aesthetically superior to the cultural production of the elite’. Nevertheless ‘..we can no longer stand older people….it's why we park them in specialised places..’
- A new President is elected and we're reminded of Trump. He wants to remove the position of Prime Minister, reduce the House members, and enshrine more power to the President. It will be a ‘post-democracy…democracy is dead as a system, it’s too slow, too ponderous’.
- Three terrorist attacks occur over the course of the election, one killing 500 people. The terrorists are described as anarcho-primitivists, like the Unabomber in the US. Such radical political movements are not unfamiliar to Houellebecq readers. As social guardrails and fences collapse, so does political order. The comfort and security of earlier conservative times is missed. And ‘…a lot of people today had become very stupid; it was a striking and indisputable contemporary phenomenon....Family and marriage: these were the two residual poles around which the lives of the last Westerners were organised in the first half of the twenty-first century...It seemed obvious to Paul that the whole system was going to come crashing down’. 'The concept of decadence...Europe as a whole had become a distant, ageing, depressive and slightly ludicrous province of the United States of America’.
- The last hundred or so pages focus on Paul's severe illness. He is diagnosed with cancer of the jaw. The medical specialists recommend a major operation including removal of his tongue, and intense radio and chemo therapy. Houellebecq dives deep into the medical details and treatment options, and the decisions Paul is confronted with. The survival rate over the next five years is very low.
- At least he and his wife Prudence re-discover their intimacy and begin to once again have frequent sex. It becomes the real joy in their lives.
- There are various dramas of life and death, of parents, partners, family, friends, and society as a whole in this amazing and very enjoyable novel.
- I highly recommend it.
(Unfortunately it is very poorly edited. It's full of so many simple errors - wrong words, missing words, commas instead of full stops, etc. For example: ‘It couldn’t have been later than five o’clock on the morning’; ‘in the end how found a space five hundred metres from the house’. Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, is a highly professional publisher, but its standards have fallen to a real low if this book is any guide.)
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