Michel Houellebecq’s “Annihilation”: A Review
It has become a bit of a cliché to point out that Michel Houellebecq is something of a prophet. The 68-year-old French writer’s debut novel Whatever (1994) gave us Raphael Tisserand – a 28-year-old virgin who considers murdering a couple on a beach out of sexual jealousy. Houellebecq published this nearly 20 years before Eliot Rodger brought the plight of the “incel” to international attention. His novel Platform (2001) depicted an Islamic terror attack at a sex resort in Thailand, published shortly before the 9/11 attacks, and a similar attack at a tourist resort in Bali. In The Map and the Territory (2010) Houellebecq foresaw the spread of assisted suicide clinics, and more recently in Serotonin (2019), he seemed to predict the “yellow vest” protests in France.
How does he get so much right? Houellebecq has stated that his strength as a novelist consists not so much in crafting a plot, but in sketching out scenes and characters. Like many great novelists before him, Houellebecq is an observer, a man who meets and talks to people, listens to them, and then incorporates aspects of what he hears in his novels and their protagonists. He also follows trends and stays abreast of current events. The “prophecies” are not delivered by an oracle – they are educated guesses about where things are headed based on close observation. This also explains why his novels generally contain much social commentary, long digressions away from the narrative. He wants to tell us something, not just entertain us.
This is true of his latest novel as well. Annihilation seems to have baffled some critics. Some objected to his graphic depictions of sex. Others have said it’s just too long (it clocks in at over 500 pages) and that its content doesn’t justify so many words. Some have suggested it is incoherent. It has been called a political thriller, a meditation on love and death, and an examination of social instability in the West. And it is all of those things. Houellebecq announces in the book itself that this would be his final novel. Perhaps he intended to take whatever he had left to say and pack it all in one final work.
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Annihilation is set in the year 2027, during a presidential election that pits the ruling neo-liberal party against a successor organization to Marine Le Pen’s National Front. The protagonist is a man called Paul Raison, a high-ranking bureaucrat who works closely with the Minister of Economics. The neo-liberals have cause to celebrate, as they have succeeded in streamlining the government and balancing the national budget. They have achieved this by working closely with an increasingly concentrated business sector, which they tax at home while aggressively promoting abroad to generate income from exports.
Small business, however, has all but vanished, and the middle class has been squeezed out of existence. The well-connected who can find employment in government or one of the few concentrated industries earn very well, but middle-class professionals have no place; they are unemployed and idle. Formerly comfortable middle-class housewives are forced to become servants for the wealthy to make ends meet. Houellebecq describes their degradation, this fall in status and sense of wellbeing, in detail.
This is a society that privileges the few and discards everyone else, which Houellebecq underscores by depicting its utter disdain for the elderly. They are shunted off into hospitals and nursing homes where they are neglected with the hope that they die off as quickly as possible. One of Houellebecq’s strengths as a novelist is his ability to jar the reader out of complacency with sudden, grotesque images that make his point. Here he describes Paul Raison on a visit to a hospital, where his father is recovering from a stroke:
It was almost dark when he parked in front of the hospital, and the first hallway he entered was poorly lit…he faced an old woman who pushed a walker in front of her. She was at least eighty years old, her long gray hair hung down on her shoulders, and she was completely naked with the exception of a dirty diaper, shit had run down her right leg… The old woman came relentlessly towards him, he struggled to look away from her sagging breasts…
A nurse at the hospital sees the woman, walks right by her, but goes about her business like she isn’t there. The well-being of patients is not a priority.
In the midst of this increasingly stratified society, a shadowy organization has begun engaging in highly sophisticated pranks. At the outset of the novel we learn of an internet video depicting the execution of the Economics Minister – Raison’s boss. He is dragged into a field and guillotined. In reality, the Minister is alive and well, but concerned about the origin and purpose of the deepfake. He tasks Raison to work with the French intelligence services to discover the members of the organization and their purpose. Working with IT experts in the government and the private sector, Raison discovers that the video is so expertly crafted that it is indistinguishable from an actual recording. Whoever put it together was more competent than any government computer scientist, as well as the best computer animation experts in the private sector. And the use of the guillotine is not random – the Minister of Economics is executed in the same manner as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. He is just as indifferent to the concerns of the average citizen as the former monarchs.
The pranks quickly escalate into actual violence. The group so expert in computer graphics demonstrates its technical capacity in naval warfare – they attack a container ship carrying cheap goods from China. But they again make a statement, and demonstrate their technical ability. They first shoot a torpedo that disables the ship’s navigation capacity, then order the evacuation of the crew, and only then destroy the ship. No one dies. The purpose of the attack is not murder, but the disruption of the sort of globalized trade that is rendering so many working and middle-class people in France superfluous.
The next target is a sperm bank in Denmark, one of the largest in the world, with vast quantities of sperm from many places. The group burns it down, and succeeds in destroying all the sperm on hand. Explaining how this attack fits with the broader narrative requires a minor digression. Paul Raison’s brother is married to a deeply unsympathetic woman who does not want to have his child. She insists on visiting a sperm bank and selecting a black sperm donor. Houellebecq comments that she did this to show how “anti-racist” she is. In reality, it is a form of humiliation. To the public, it is clear that the boy is not her husband’s son, and this degradation is the point. The attack on the sperm bank is not just about defending natural forms of reproduction, but of maintaining the integrity of fathers.
The attacks culminate in what is an obvious reference to Jean Raspail’s novel Camp of the Saints, a 1973 dystopia depicting third world hordes leading an invasion of France, incensed by disparities of global wealth and intent on taking over the West. The French police and military lose their nerve, fail to defend their border, and the country is overrun. In Annihilation, the shadowy group spots a ship carrying 500 migrants from Africa intent on entering France, and sinks the ship with a snap torpedo shot – killing everyone on board. The private, shadowy group does what the government in Camp of the Saints lacked the nerve to do.
Houellebecq describes the reactions of government officials to all this death. He notes that they put on a big show of remorse, which is obviously hypocritical since they don’t care much. More interesting is how he describes the general public, who watch the video showing the ship being torpedoed and sunk:
The entire sequence – which documented the fight for survival of each individual victim… lasted a little longer than forty minutes, but probably only a few television viewers watched until the end, only those who did not tire of watching African migrants die.
The general public is indifferent. They are tired of having their country invaded by foreign people. Houellebecq was recently quoted as saying the so-called “great replacement” is not a “theory” but a “fact.” This episode should be seen in that light.
Who are the members of the shadow group? We don’t know, but they are highly intelligent, highly competent people with technical skill, and apparently have not found positions in the neo-liberal society Houellebecq depicts. Presumably, they are young people who want a France that stays France, a country they can pass on to their children. They are the people we see all over the West who feel displaced, with all kinds of programs designed to sideline them.
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While most of the reviews have been mixed, generally lukewarm, I found Annihilation – as any other Houellebecq novel – compulsively readable. It is a sprawling book. What I have described above is its framework, not the meat of the novel. At the core of Annihilation is the story of Paul Raison, who leads a successful but empty life, and then rediscovers love and meaning. But this is what every review I encountered talked about. Houellebecq’s warnings about where contemporary society is headed have been ignored. But they are just as important, if not more.
If there is any kind of warning in Houellebecq’s last novel, it reads like this:
If the government places spreadsheet data above the physical needs of its people; if it fails to provide opportunity for many of its most talented citizens; if it treats its elderly like trash to be discarded; if it prioritizes the needs of foreigners over those of its own citizens and fails to defend its borders and culture – then eventually those talented people who cannot find a place in their own society will take matters into their own hands. They will play jokes on the emotionally distant leaders, disrupt the economy, and protect the border – by force if necessary.
Is it unrealistic to think that a shadowy band of highly capable people who have been shut out of a heartless, globalist economy could step in and do what the government lacks the will to do? At the present moment, the answer may be yes. On the other hand, space exploration was once the preserve of the federal government in the form of NASA and companies like Boeing. That’s no longer going well. It took Elon Musk to create SpaceX to reignite interest in space exploration. So Houellebecq’s prediction, or warning, that private sector people will step up where government fails appears less unrealistic by the day.
Nathan Fischer is a pseudonymous writer and cultural observer. He can be followed @FischerKing64.
