Change, decay and success

After having for so long been treated with such disdain by the French literary establishment, Michel Houellebecq has at last been embraced by it. Last week La carte et le territoire, his fifth novel, was awarded the Prix Goncourt, a distinction any of his previous novels might just as well have merited.

Perhaps it has been possible to do him this belated justice because La carte et le territoire is less explicitly scandalous than its predecessors, more conventionally substantial even. If his previous novels have insolently portrayed life in our faithless, free-market world as a race between sex and death, here that race is over. There is almost no sex in this book. Houellebecq has been telling interviewers in France that he is old, that he may not have long, that this may be his last novel, that it is about ageing and the end. Michel Houellebecq is 54 — but then he has always been brutal about the value we place on youth, how rapidly it goes and how little then is left.

The apparent subject of La carte et le territoire is the life of an artist. Jed Martin is the son of an architect who dreams of building fantastic cities but has a business designing holiday resorts; his mother committed suicide when he was seven. Jed dedicates himself to an artistic career of ‘giving an objective description of the world’, beginning with photographs of ironmongery. Then, driving down to his grandmother’s funeral, he buys a Michelin map of the Creuse and Haute-Vienne and is enraptured by that clear depiction of such richness of life.

At his exhibition of treated photographs of these maps, he meets Olga, a beautiful, Francophile Russian who works in communications for Michelin, another of Houellebecq’s adored women.