David Sexton

The really shocking thing about Michel Houllebecq’s Soumission — he rather likes Islam

David Sexton delights in Soumission, the latest electrifying offering from France’s bad-boy novelist, but warns that an English translation will not be available until the autumn

Michel Houellebecq’s sixth novel, imagining an Islamic government taking power in France in 2022, has been widely assumed to be an act of pure provocation. He is, after all, the author who faced legal trouble after having said in an interview in 2001: ‘La religion la plus con, c’est quand même l’islam.’

Soumission (Submission) was announced quite suddenly by Flammarion in December for the first week of the New Year, with an initial print run of 150,000 copies. So keen was the interest that it was pirated online before publication. It’s an event — but a literary event, it turns out.

For Soumission is a fine, deeply literary work, not a prank. It’s devoted just as much to the 19th-century novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (evidently its point of origin for Houellebecq) as it is to the future of Islam in Europe, offering a sustained, revealing commentary on his life and work throughout the book. So it’s profoundly inter-textual — even, in its way, a campus novel, you could say.

The first-person narrator, François, is a professor of literature at Paris III-Sorbonne, appointed after having spent seven years of his life writing a 780-page thesis, ‘Joris-Karl Huysmans, or the exit from the tunnel’, followed by a book, Vertiges des neologismes, about his innovatory vocabulary. Houellebecq has duly given François considerable linguistic flair himself.

Now 44, François, who has never liked teaching, and drinks like a fish, is at a loss what to do with what is left of his life, wondering if he’s suffering some kind of ‘andropause’. He has been steadily sleeping with students, changing them each year, the latest being a Jewish girl of 22, Myriam, whom he loves. ‘For men love is nothing other than gratitude for pleasure given. Every one of her blowjobs would have been enough to justify the life of a man’, François observes gratefully.

Politics, on the other hand, means little to him — he feels about as politicised as a hand-towel, he says.

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