Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel Annihilation offers a lengthy (526-page) disquisition on the journey to death, which is life itself, in all its tragedy and absurdity. In particular, the novel unfolds the preoccupations of an individual coming to terms with his impending demise. There is also a searing critique of prevailing cultural and institutional attitudes towards aging and infirmity. Apart from the economic dimension, the evident detachment and even callousness – strikingly apparent during the Covid pandemic – is surely linked to our inability to contend with new technologies. As Paul, the main protagonist puts it:
What was the point of installing 5G if you simply couldn’t make contact with one another anymore, and perform the essential gestures, the ones that allow the human species to reproduce, the ones that also, sometimes, allow you to be happy?
Annihilation is a tale, or a collection of interlinked tales, portraying a broken, unhappy, society, where the family unit has been seriously undermined, but perhaps surprisingly it offers hope to the disaffected, however obliquely.
At first, it seems that only by embracing traditional values, including the Catholic faith, can someone experience the good life – here represented by the lives of the benevolent Cécile, Paul’s sister, and her stalwart husband Hervé, who both support the far-right National Rally.
The more politically centrist Paul does, however, ultimately achieve contentment through romantic love, especially the resumption – after a ten-year hiatus – of sexual relations with his wife Prudence. Over the course of the novel, he seems to develop an appreciation of how such goods as pleasure, virtue, honour and wealth fit together, recalling the Aristotlean concept of eudaimonia, the highest good humans could strive toward, a life ‘well lived.’
This intellectual and emotional journey occurs as he confronts the abyss, of death, which he considers ‘absolute destruction.’ Blaise Pacal’s words resonate with Paul: ‘The final act is bloody, however beautiful the comedy of all the rest: in the end dirt is thrown on your head and that’s it forever.’
It is perhaps safe to assume that this reflects the author’s own eschatological assessment, although any kind of nihilism is strenuously resisted in the novel. Love, familial and romantic, and the exercise of reason, appear to be the saving graces.
Moreover, despite the contentment that Cécile exhibits from a traditional outlook, her beliefs appear naïve – albeit her faith in a form of resurrection is vindicated. That religious adherence, however, seems to require the exclusion of doubt, and even the suspension of reason, and, importantly, the avoidance of absurdity. Revealingly, the author doesn’t acquaint us with her innermost thoughts and reflections. It’s as if these aren’t worthy of recounting.
Sexual Obsession
A somewhat comedic element is supplied by frequent allusions to sex and desire. Indeed, sexual references are an occasionally jarring staple found throughout Houellebecq’s novels, explaining in large measure his Marmite effect. What may verge on an obsession, does act as a useful critique of bourgeois propriety, which is artfully scorned.
Perhaps the most amusing, and sordid, interlude among these sequences in Annihilation involves Paul deciding to visit a prostitute before he resumes carnal relations with Prudence – ‘a girl to check that it worked, as a sort of intermediary before coming back to normal sex.’
By this point, the couple’s sex life has ended prematurely, in part because of Prudence’s New Age spirituality. Dietary choices are symptomatic of their wider alienation from one another. Revealingly, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss identified copulation with eating, as both processes involve a union of two complementary elements – une conjunction par complementairé. Prudence and Paul do not dine together.
They also sleep in separate rooms in a luxury apartment on Paris’s Rue Lheureux. According to the narrator: ‘The coincidence’ of their joint purchase ‘was not accidental’, as ‘an improvement in living conditions often goes hand-in-hand with a deterioration of reasons for living, and living together in particular.’ The couple inhabit a neoliberal tragedy of endless choice and stifled desire.
Having resolved to engage the services of a ‘high class’ prostitute once Prudence’s spiritual journey leads to a sexual re-awakening, he encounters a young woman called Mélodie in a dimly lit room. After some interplay – including what Bill Clinton claimed fell short of ‘sexual relations’ – Paul asks the young woman to turn on a brighter light, whereupon Mélodie’s true identity is revealed as his niece, Anne-Lise, wholesome Cécile’s daughter.
It’s a pretty sick joke, directed perhaps at the Catholic values of Anne-Lise’s unknowing parents, although it seems no great harm is done to family relations. When next they meet Anne-Lise tells her uncle she is glad to have been able to help restore relations with Prudence. Thankfully her parents never get wind of the seedy liaison.
Annihilation reveals a romantic side to Houellebecq nonetheless, as he tenderly depicts the re-flourishing of a loving relationship between Paul and Prudence, which endures to the end. Earlier in the novel, the narrator wonders: ‘Is it true that the first image that we leave in the eyes of the beloved is always superimposed, for ever, on to what we become?’ Despite outward disfigurement the ideal of love can endure.
Unsurprisingly – this is a Houellebecq novel after all – there is a caveat, as the narrator portrays children as the agents of destruction:
After destroying its parents as a couple, the child sets about destroying them individually, its chief preoccupation being to wait for their death so that it can inherit its legacy, as clearly established in the French realist literature of the nineteenth century.
Spy Thriller
Annihilation is also at a certain level a spy thriller, in which Paul, and his colleagues in the Ministry, untangle a wave of apparently unrelated and quite distinctive terror attacks through recourse to archaic symbols. This fascinating plotline, however, fades into the background as the more pressing question of mortality hoves into view.
Indeed, Paul feels that the destruction of contemporary society and culture would not be an altogether unwelcome development: ‘the worst thing was that if the terrorists’ goal was to annihilate the world as he knew it, to annihilate the modern world, he couldn’t entirely blame them.’
Paul acts as a chef de cabinet to a senior, high-functioning Minister who is considering running for the presidency, but despite his obvious ability he ultimately lacks the egotistical drive, confiding to Paul, ‘the president has one political conviction, and only one. It is exactly the same as that of all his predecessor, and can be summed up in the phrase: “I am made to be president of the Republic”’
The ensuing presidential election in the novel looks very like the last two that have taken place in France, where the National Rally candidate secures the largest share of the vote in the first round, but falls short in the second once disunited left-wing voters rally around a pragmatic centrist candidate. In the novel, and real life, this creates an unshifting political landscape, a technocracy dominated by a leadership cadre educated in the same elite institutions, who largely pursue the same neoliberal goals.
The position of President thus becomes the preserve of a cynical, egotist such as the incumbent, who seems distasteful to almost everyone in France today. In the novel, Paul concludes that with the convergence of the media and political sphere, democracy is dead.
Touching Account
Above all, Annihilation is a touching account of a family brought together – at least for a while – by their father Édouard suffering a stroke that renders him ‘a vegetable’ according to his deeply unpleasant daughter-in-law, a vindictive journalist who has conceived a child with a black sperm donor, seemingly in order to humiliate her husband, Paul’s artistic and timid brother Aurélien.
To start with Édouard is well treated in the care home, where the family, including his second wife, are permitted to play a nurturing role. This brings great improvements to his condition and despite continuing to be mute he learns to communicate once again. Conditions in the facility deteriorate precipitously, however, due to institutional in-fighting, to a point where Édouard’s life is threatened.
This gives the author an opportunity to castigate contemporary Western attitudes towards the old and infirm left to rot in uncaring institutions. He contrasts these with the approach of many of those working in such places. Thus, ‘for most Maghrebis putting their parents in an institution would have meant dishonour.’
In the end the family resolve to remove their father from the facility, contacting an unlikely band of anti-euthanasia activists who successfully organise a heist, spiriting the patient away. There are, however, repercussions for Paul due to it being exposed in an article by his malign sister-in-law, who has at this stage been spurned by the tragic Aurélien in favour of an African nurse. The author leaves us in no doubt about his views on euthanasia, which he sees as a symptomatic of European nihilism.
Any novel is obviously not, and nor should it be, a systematic work of philosophy or sociology. Moreover, it would be simplistic to assume that Paul’s views cohere exactly with the author’s own. Nonetheless, Houellebecq’s unflinching account of contemporary society, mainly expressed through Paul, ought to raise alarm bells.
Most of us are ill-equipped to deal with the deaths of those close to us, never mind our own. Technology is distorting our appreciation of reality, while supposedly rising living standards are not making us any happier. It would be easy to dismiss Houellebecq as a sex-obsessed sensationalist, but there are few contemporary novelists able to diagnose the ills of our society in such an entertaining manner.
