Agitated Neurons

John Sturrock

• Whatever by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Paul Hammond
  Serpent’s Tail, 160 pp, £8.99, January 1999, ISBN 1 85242 584 9
• Les Particules élémentaires by Michel Houellebecq
  Flammarion, 394 pp, frs 105.00, September 1998, ISBN 2 08 067472 2

The writer in France is having a good winter, whose autumn novel is no sooner out than it is being roundly abused on all sides for its dubious attitudes, and is then passed over by the jurors of the Prix Goncourt, who would rather argument turned, as by custom it does, on the forgettability of the novel they have picked, not on any bad smell given off by its contents. Les Particules élémentaires is only the second novel that Michel Houellebecq has written, but a book as boldly out of tune with the times as this will have no trouble outliving the flush of suspect publicity that might have led to its swift eclipse. It is aggressive in thought, often enough tacky in deed, and driven by a radical intolerance of the ways and means of a society that the novelist sees as terminally degenerate. He is likely to enjoy a lonely celebrity, with few from the left, right and certainly not the peace-loving centre anxious to risk association with his broadly misanthropic views. On the evidence of this novel, and of some of the sour answers he’s reported as giving when interviewed, Houellebecq has been accused of occupying several shunnable political or intellectual positions, Fascism, nihilism, Stalinism and eugenicism among them. How seriously he occupies any one position at all is open to question, but he has clearly stirred things up to promising effect among the dozing adherents of what I’ve lately seen referred to in France as ‘la pensée unique’, which makes it sound as though that once heroically fissile community can no longer raise the intellectual energy to dispute the premisses of the liberal consensus.