Michel Houellebecq's ANNIHILATION (Tr Shawn Whiteside)

Michel Houellebecq is an author I don't particularly like but I add compulsively to my towering, teetering TBR pile the way I often shake a few drops of bitters into my plain soda water. It's just not the same without it, though it tastes like ass by itself.

I don't read a lot of him in a row, is what I'm saying.

But when he publishes a new book, I'm never not interested. 

But so, since I have Houellebecq filed in my head as an unpleasant but necessary man to read, not as bad as Robert Silverberg or Albert Cossery in that I never want to read anything else by either of those authors ever again but still as someone I kind of need to brace myself for, imagine my surprise to discover that his latest novel, Annihilation is moving, human and lovely!

This is not to say that Annihilation is not bitter or bleak -- I mean, just get a load of the title! -- as I was expecting; there's still plenty to grit one's teeth through in this story of a prosperous civil servant enduring the disappointments of middle age in 21st century France. But our man Paul, whose image first really came into focus for me in a scene straight out of my favorite Editors song, depicting him smoking outside the hospital where his father has just been admitted as a coma patient, is the most sympathetic character I've seen Houellebecq create, and it's not even close.*

We first meet him as he's beginning to tackle a worrisome problem at his job, where I imagine him as a sort of colleague of Bug's father at Not-Nutella. An unknown entity is releasing very provocative video clips on the Internet, designed to stir maximum fear and unrest in French society. One even depicts the head of Paul's department, Bernard, who is the French Minister of Finance and a potential candidate for the next President of France, being decapitated. For a while, then, Annihilation feels like it's going to be a fancy high tech thriller/crime investigation, as Paul calls in personal resources to help him unravel who is doing this and why. For instance, an old friend who founded one of the best cinematic special effects companies in the world reviews the footage so far and quickly informs Paul that nobody, not his own firm, not Industrial Light and Magic, nobody, is currently capable of creating what they have been reviewing at the level of detail and realism they are seeing.

And then things get weirder and worse.

In the midst of all of this intrigue, Paul's elderly, widowed father, a retired intelligence agent who still retains some files that his former masters have asked Paul to get back for them (possibly, somehow, related to the case Paul is currently working on, meaning dear old Dad may have one last chance to be a hero), has suffered a medical emergency that has left him in a coma. And Paul, whom we've seen so far as something of a typical cold and bitter Houellebecq character, is landed in a whole mess of family drama, involving his father's "companion" Madeline (originally a live-in nurse but now a romantic partner that it's easier to just regard as a wife), Paul's devoutly Catholic sister Cecile and her easy-going husband Herve and their daughters**, their much-younger brother Aurielle and his insufferable wife, Indy, and a whole host of compassionate but firm medical professionals who are there to ease them all through the transition from having a busy and still-active father to having one who will probably never walk or talk or do things for himself again.

All of these characters are richly realized and sympathetically portrayed enough to give the scenes between them considerable emotional heft without ever drifting into melodrama.

But lest I sound like Houellebecq has gone completely soft in his old age, there are still a few passages like this, which could have been lifted from The Elementary Particles, to remind us of with whom we're dealing: 

For some years, it's true, the balls of shit had been copulating in smaller numbers, they seemed to have learned to reflect one another, they were aware of their mutual stench, and disgustedly parted company; an extinction of the human race seemed imaginable in the medium term. That left other trash like cockroaches and bears, but you can't sort everything out at the same time, Paul said to himself.

This as he contemplates the recent destruction by the mystery terrorists of a Danish sperm bank. A golden star to you if you can guess what the balls of shit are in the above.

But all of this is just camouflage for the book's true nature. Houellebecq lies in wait for us at the bottom of a sandy funnel to which he has baited us with illusions of technothrillery and heartfelt family drama. We've traipsed along these fascinating and moving edges like an ant on a patch of sand, not noticing the funnel shape the sand is gradually assuming until abruptly the sides have gotten too steep. We fall into Houellebecq's waiting jaws; he will drain us and toss our husks back onto the pile of corpses above, the pile that we also did not notice while we were distracted by Paul's rediscovery of his marriage, by his father's apparent holding of the key to the mystery. 

And at last the title of the novel, heretofore seeming maybe an ironic joke at our expense, makes sense. I won't call Annihilation a shaggy dog story as such, but it shares some of that thing's qualities, though in service of a point a shaggy dog story lacks. I will caution you that,  for a little while after finishing Annihilation, I felt a bit disappointed in it. So might you. But I suspect that on further reflection you might overcome this feeling, as I did a few days later, when I realized what Houellebecq had, in fact, achieved. 

I suppose if anyone was, with his (probable) last book, going to reveal himself as a literary ant lion, it would be Michel Fucking Houellebecq.

Now excuse me; I am dealing with my own issues with aging and also with unhipness. I have only just discovered that Houellebecq is in a film with Iggy Pop. How the hell did this escape my notice????? Oh yeah, there was a presidential election and stuff going on, even way back then.

*Not that I've read all of his novels; just most of them.

**One of whom has an encounter with Paul out in the world that is possibly the funniest passage I've ever encountered in Houellebecq.