A few hours after Michel Houellebecq’s Submission was released in France, gunmen stormed into the office of Charlie Hebdo and murdered 12 people, including eight journalists. Among the victims was the economist Bernard Maris, one of Houellebecq’s closest friends. The cover of Charlie Hebdo that week showed a grotesque and lecherous Houllebecq predicting that in 2022 (when Submission is set) he’d observe Ramadan. Laurent Joffrin, editor of Libération, wrote that Submission “will mark the date in history when the ideas of the far right made a grand return to serious French literature,” and armed guards were placed at the offices of Houellebecq’s publishers.

Submission is both a more subtle and less immediately scandalous satire than the brouhaha surrounding it might suggest. Rather than being a dark vision of a world ruled by mad mullahs, it presents the moderate Muslims who take over France as a force of spiritual integrity and revolutionary verve, “a historic opportunity for the moral and familial rearmament of Europe”; the real targets of the book are France’s bloated institutions, its venal politicians, its sclerotic literary scene. In Public Enemies, his exchange of letters with philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy, Houellebecq describes himself as “Nihilist, reactionary, cynic, racist, shameless misogynist… an unremarkable author with no style.” As is the case in his earlier novels, particularly the Prix Goncourt-winning The Map and the Territory (in which a fictional author named Michel Houellebecq is murdered), the target of Submission, more than anyone else, appears to be Houellebecq himself.

The novel is narrated by François, a 44-year-old professor at the Sorbonne and an expert on the fin-de-siècle Decadent novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans. François, who describes himself as “about as political as a bath towel”, is sitting down to watch the 2022 election results. France has endured a decade of political infighting and scandal, with the sense building that “the widening gap, now a chasm, between the people and those who claimed to speak for them, the politicians and journalists, would necessarily lead to something violent and unpredictable”. The very Ballardian violence comes from rogue Salafist jihadists and their far-right counterparts, the Nativists (imagine the EDL with brains); the unpredictability comes from the fact that, as the votes are counted, Marine Le Pen and her Front National are neck-and-neck with a fictional party, the Muslim Brotherhood, led by a shrewd and charismatic grocer’s son, Mohammed Ben Abbes (the Brotherhood appears to be loosely based on Nagib Azergui’s UDMF). The socialists, under Manuel Valls, prefer the devil they don’t know, and form a coalition with the Brotherhood. Ben Abbes is named president. The flip-flopping François Bayrou (currently mayor of Pau) becomes prime minister.

The changes under Ben Abbes’s government are swift and calculating. While Le Pen, who comes across as a Marianne-figure, a solitary heroine amid the blundering male fools of French politics, leads a march on the Champs Elysées, the move to a sharia state is largely accepted without protest. Unemployment is solved by women being forced from the workforce, the national deficit is eradicated through cuts to education, with the Sorbonne closing (and François out of a job): “Under the new system, mandatory education ended with junior school, around age twelve.” All women are forced to wear the veil; Jews (including François’s on-off student girlfriend, Myriam) are encouraged to emigrate to Israel; and as more countries across Europe fall to Islamist parties and Morocco, Turkey and Tunisia join the EU (while “negotiations with Lebanon and Egypt were going well”), France finds itself restored to a position of global power. Crucially, this is a linguistic as well as a political victory, with French rehabilitated from its marginal position on the world’s stage.

In the foreground of this march towards a global caliphate, we have François, whose immersion in Huysmans is twinned with an almost complete lack of interest or education in anything else. He claims to devote his life to literature but is unable to see much beyond the rebellious workings of his own body. There are several pages told from the perspective of his penis, and he views the passing of each academic year as the chance to seduce and sodomise another one of his students. He suffers from any number of complaints from dyshidrosis to haemorrhoids, describing their symptoms with a Naturalist exactitude of which Zola would be proud. He’s a misogynist, a misanthrope and an aesthete, reduced to TV dinners and a life of crushing solitude, all described with lashings of Houellebecq’s characteristically phosphorescent bile.

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Huysmans’s work, and particularly his crepuscular masterpiece À Rebours, sits palimpsest-like behind Submission, marshalling its obsessions and providing a satisfying extra layer to an already complex novel. At the end of À Rebours, as he is leaving his country retreat for Paris, the hero, Des Esseintes, says to himself: “Well, it is all over now. Like a tide-race, the waves of human mediocrity are rising to the heavens and will engulf this refuge… Lord, take pity on the Christian who doubts … who puts out to sea alone, in the night, beneath a firmament no longer lit by the consoling beacon fires of the ancient hope!”

It is this ancient hope – the need for religion, which is one of Submission’s driving fascinations. The Catholics have all but disappeared from France, we are told, and the kind of conversion undergone by Huysmans, who entered a monastery towards the end of his life, is no longer possible – Christianity, according to François, is weak and “feminine,” and yet he understands Huysmans’s “desperate desire to be part of a religion”. He travels to the ancient shrine of the Black Virgin of Rocamadour, where he has something close to a spiritual revelation. He goes back to Paris and its veiled women to find that the Sorbonne has reopened as the Islamic University of Paris-Sorbonne, backed by Saudi funds. Its new head, Robert Rediger, a former Nativist who has converted to Islam and taken several wives, one of them 15 years old, begins the project of converting François.

Submission, as is fitting for a dystopia written in the mode of the “not yet”, ends in a proleptic future tense, speaking of what will come for François and (with rather less authorial interest) for the people of France. Houellebecq seems to be saying that French society, in the form of its politicians, its journalists, its academics and not least its novelists, will get exactly what it deserves – a state run by those who believe in something bigger and grander than the pelf and perquisites of their elevated positions. That we feel Houellebecq’s satire (like all the best from Swift to Céline to Waugh) is only half in jest makes reading Submission a shifty, discomfiting affair: we’re never sure quite how many steps ahead of us the author is; how much of the nastiness is meant and how much mere drôlerie; how many levels lie beneath, just waiting to suck us down from our moral high ground.

Submission is published by Heinemann (£18.99). Click here to buy it for £15.19