Commenter OliverTwist responds to my questions (in italics) about French novelist Michel Houellebecq’s upcoming novel “Submission,” in which in the 2022 French presidential primary election, the two top vote-getters are rightist Marine Le Pen and an Islamist candidate. Just as in 2002, in 2022 the French Establishment closes ranks against the Le Pen family, even at the cost of a subsequent Islamist takeover of French culture. OliverTwist comments:

Soumission comes out in bookstores in two days. It has not yet been translated into English. But I just finished reading it. And it is a great book.

Sailer: My impression is that this is portrayed as less a top-down imposition by the new government than a bottom-up swelling of support for the New Order from French people who have been taught that Catholicism and nationalism are outdated, and thus turn to Islam to give them something to believe in.

This is portrayed as a top-down imposition by the old ruling elite: center-left and center-right politicians, television pundits, intellectuals, writers of op-ed pieces, archbishops, billionaires, singers, actors, novelists, technocrats, economists, etc. The old ruling elite were not themselves Muslim, but had agreed to instruct the French people to vote for the Fraternité Musulmane rather than for the anti-immigration Front National. Like a good sheep, the median voter obeyed. This is a “hostile elite” theme.

I don’t see any mention of [1973 novel] The Camp of the Saints

Because that is the Third Rail of French politics. Houellebecq is already getting excoriated for Soumission, but at least he found an editor for it. If it was published today, Le Camp des Saints could be tried for 87 violations of the law. Any novel that hovers too close to it could be tried for a dozen different reasons. This is Le Camp des Saints for an un-free society.

Houellebecq’s innovation appears to be portray the triumph of Islam in France as sort of a good thing.

The only good thing about the triumph of Islam in France for the hero of Soumission is that it would enable him to enter a polygamous marriage. He’d have an older wife to cook for him every evening, and a teenager to please him sexually. The hero is a pervert professor who sleeps with his students and likes home-cooked food. Given that it is his best argument, I do not think Houellebecq is selling Islam very well.

Is he a master of French prose?

Actually, yes. He is probably the only French writer worth reading these days. He is a literary author in the purest and highest sense of the term. He is worthy of the Nobel Prize in Literature and that is why he will never, ever get it. He is the Voltaire or the Soljenitsyne of our times. With Soumission, our Voltaire has written his Candide; our Soljenitsyne has written his Gulag Archipelago. He deconstructed the myths that Western elites peddle, and used derision to destroy them. From now on the whole invite-the-world agenda is a hollow shell.

My question is: why is Houellebecq given respectable platforms?

That is because he sails very close to the wind without getting caught by it. He is so smart that he runs circles around the media hacks who are out to get his scalp. He sells so many books he is unassailable. He can write whatever he wants and does not care. If the French finally come to accept the basic fact that their social model is unsustainable due to mass immigration, and intellectually accept the consequences of that, it will be because of his art.