Atomised

Michel Houellebecq, trs Frank Wynne

(Vintage, £6.99)

Buy it at a discount at BOL

The friends of Michel Houellebecq: an online introduction

Houellebecq interview

Not that many novels get chosen by me as Pick of the Week. After reading Atomised , the reasons for this become clear. For against it, the contemporary British novel, with a few, scattered exceptions, suddenly seems timid, bogus, and footling. Not to mention atrociously written. I was prodded into thinking this by a remark by Julian Barnes on the back cover: "a novel which hunts big game while others settle for shooting rabbits". He is right; although Atomised also makes you wonder if other, ordinary writers have the coordination even to do the Shake 'n' Vac, let alone hunt fictional rabbits.

It tells the story of two half-brothers, Bruno and Michel, both children of a libertine hippy mother who had as little as possible to do with their upbringing. Houellebecq's childhood was very similar to this; the two main characters can be seen as divergent yet related elements of his own self.

Michel Djerzinski is a diligent, brilliant scientist who gives up his job as a researcher working on decoding genomes or whatever in order "to think". As his superior puts it: "decoding DNA, pfff . . . you decode one gene, then another and another . . . it's like following a recipe. From time to time someone comes up with better equipment and they give him the Nobel Prize. It's a joke." From which you can decipher not only that Houellebecq's cynicism is sincere and well researched, but that he can be very funny indeed. (And, in passing, that the translation would appear to be first-rate.)

How can you not warm to a book that contains observations such as the following: "Some people live to be 70, sometimes 80 years old believing that there is always something new just around the corner, as they say; in the end they practically have to be killed or at least reduced to a state of serious incapacity to get them to see reason." How can you fail to love a writer who creates a character who, filling in a questionnaire at the back of a supermarket magazine, is described thus: "the only three activities he could actually tick off were sitting, lying down and sleeping". Michel turns out to be a hero who rescues the human race from itself; his solution is a gauntlet Houellebecq throws down to all of us. You may not like it; you're not meant to.

Michel's half-brother, Bruno, is a more problematic individual; where Michel has virtually no sex drive at all, Bruno is obsessed, with the unfortunate twist that for long periods of his life, he doesn't get enough. He exposes himself to a girl in the class to which he teaches literature; he is sent to a mental institution (as was Houellebecq, if not for the same reason). He goes to a hippy holiday commune, the Lieu du Changement, and the vacuity of all New Age bullshit is brilliantly attacked. ("Tantric Zen, which combined vanity, mysticism, and frottage, flourished.") Bruno is the id to Michel's ego, if you want to use specious terms.

This is a bold and unsettling portrait of a society falling apart: the rage that both left and right, the piously religious as well as the humanists, have expressed towards Houellebecq is pretty much the rage of Caliban seeing his face in the glass. There is not too much doubt that Houellebecq is an unpleasant person. (We're no slouches in this regard, but France has a gift for producing nasty writers.) One does not want to examine his ideas on race too deeply, just yet. I would get this and read it before that particular time bomb explodes.