Book Review: 'The Possibility of an Island' by Michel Houellebecq

I thought again of Daniel ... and, for the first time, I was tempted to pity him, without, however, respecting him.

If someone would have suggested to me that the novel, as a genuine art form, was dead, that it had effectively died in the 80s sometime; or, at the very least, it had been in what amounted to a slow, wasting coma since then, and would never really emerge, and we may as well flick a switch and be done with the whole fucking thing; I would have found very little to argue agin ‘im. Now, however, I would toss him a copy of this novel.

 

If I had it on me.

Which would be unlikely.

I mean, I would have had to be standing right in front of my bookcase.

And if I had a second copy.

And I’d still want it back, I would impress upon them.

After hearing about Houellebecq I had already kinda vowed that I would no longer read any more French until I could read it in French. Then a friend waves a second-hand copy of this book in English in front of my face and it’s ten bucks in Federation Square and I cave in like a Chinese coalmine...

’It was an ex-boyfriend...’ she said in English, as if to convey that it wasn’t very important.

Because, really, I wanted to know if I was going to love him like I thought I was going to love him. So, surely, those gods who still care about such things as vows, even literary vows, would cut this brother a break on this one, huh? Huh? And I do love him. In English, at least, thanks to Gavin Bowd.

It’s amusing to observe that it’s always the enemies of freedom who find themselves, at one moment or another, most in need of it.

Houellebecq has been called everything. He has been branded with the ‘ists and the ‘phobes. It’s amazing that he’s published at all, really. Maybe it’s a French thing? And you can see where socio-political ire can certainly be drawn in this novel. You just need to peruse some of the review-fodder on this site. The primary narrative focal character is white and a man and a heterosexual and ageing. And he’s brutally honest about a process of these things in the society he occupies ... and is occupied by.

To increase desires to an unbearable level whilst making the the fulfillment of them more and more inaccessible: this was the single principle upon which Western society was based.

And, yeah, he obsesses over his dick, as in, he would like it to work. Wow. How the fuck does this not feature in more novels with some degree of interiority of an ageing man? That’s what you should ask yourself if that’s what you’re whining about. There is something both beautiful and savage in the way in which Houellebecq plays with the sense of polemic in his fiction here, and when you read the angry people, he seems to have written these people’s rants too. They seem like his characters. You could slot them into the book in most cases, no problem at all, since he has this sense of humanity that defeats them even in their base expression. It’s cute, but terrifying too.

...this opposition between eroticism and tenderness appeared to me as it truly is: one of the worst examples of bullshit of our time, one of those that signs, definitively, the death warrant of civilization.

 And it is about civilization, and the civilised, that Houellebecq writes about. We get to read work from three different Daniels, the first of which is a stand-up ‘shock’ comic who ends up hating the sound of laughter. The other two are different versions of him from the future.

...then they grow weary, little by little, narcissistic competition takes the upper hand, and in the end they fuck even less than at the time of strong religious morality.

 

And Daniel diminishes before our eyes, but he fights, and he rages against the dying of the light. Even when he gives in, even when he goes down, he does it in a way that is completely undignified and unwholesome, which is a kind of victory, the only kind possible in Houellebecq’s world here.

It’s sad, the shipwreck of a civilization, it’s sad to see its most beautiful minds sink without a trace — one begins to feel ill at ease in life, and one ends up wanting to establish an Islamic republic.

Houellebecq plays with the sense of the individual and being a man (that is, in the specific visceral sense, not ‘masculinities’) as well as the role religion (and the sense of the religious), science (and the sense of the scientific) play and interact with consumer-capitalism. Once a fully working and well-marketed model can operate between all these realms, then humanity becomes neohumanity, and humanity is no more than a then ending whimper. And there is much about neohumanity that is already among us, the Supreme Sister, and there’s plenty of them already, the kind of new-puritanism that always runs, paradoxically, across the crass, advertising-ploy of hyper-sexualisation. Where it's all '...a question of casting aside any notion of poltical choice, the source ... of 'false but violent' passions. And in and among all this, there is Love. But not necessarily as-narrative, but as the instant, as not an island that exists firmly and resolutely there, solid, a refuge, among teeming seas; but as its possibility, the idea that such a thing can-be despite it not being able to. So that maybe the neohuman can be human?

...this had happened all the same, despite us, despite me ... we had not surrendered, to the end we had refused to collaborate and to accept a system that was designed to destroy us.

Houellebecq, for his part, does not seem to delight in the kinds of things he explores regarding humanity. He seems as much horrified by a Daniel1 as any other version. But there's a sense of pity, and a sense of hope, too; even if a sad hope. It really is frighteningly powerful stuff, and may even convince you that the sex and colour and age and sexuality of an author is not the driving force behind the work? No? Unlike for Supreme Sister...

 

The problem is, she's both right and wrong, but wrong most horribly.

Et je vais lire La possibilité d'une île un jour ... en langue française.