The controversial author of Atomised sets his new – and possibly last – novel in the world of French politics.

In Annihilation, Michel Houellebecq scaffolds a political thriller in order to mourn the decay of Western European life. Bodies, relationships and politics all disintegrate.

First published in 2022 and translated from the French by Shaun Whiteside, Annihilation outlines a declining French economy and moral decadence via protagonist Paul Raison, advisor to Finance Minister Bruno Juge.

Juge is weighing up running for president when a deepfake of his decapitation surfaces online and a rightwing populist, his likely competitor, gains in the polls.

Meanwhile, the marriage and family life of his advisor, Paul, sour. Paul dozes off into dream sequences and his waking life involves unnecessary calculations and prime numbers.

Paul’s brother Aurelian wants to divorce his wife, Indy; their father, Edouard, a retired intelligence agent, loses his ability to speak after a stroke.

But Annihilation’s setup intentionally falls short. Instead of moving towards a resolution, its characters suffer and continue suffering.

Traditional values decay and boundaries of social acceptability are tested, albeit with a humanist bent. Before a rightwing activist liberates Edouard from an aged care home, he makes a broad swipe at ageism.

The real reason for euthanasia, in fact, is that we can no longer stand old people, we don’t even want to know that they exist, and that’s why we park them in specialized places away from the eyes of other human beings. Almost all people today see the value of a human being as declining as their age increases; that the life of a young man, and even more of a child, is broadly of greater value than that of a very old person …

In the tradition of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night, Houellebecq attacks politics, religion and the body with a modern touch to slate New-Age spiritualists with the old message that ideology or government will not solve our problems.

Houellebecq’s celebrated motif is to inhabit the parts of our minds we avoid. But whether he’s an enfant terrible or just a plain arsehole, his ideas are sticky and we enjoy talking about him.

Though the death of French religious and moral life is a recurring theme in Annihilation, the real despair comes from knowing that traditional values can no longer return; to restore the nuclear family, the conventional marriage and church on Sundays feels clunky and dishonest now the world has irreversibly changed.

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard furthered the ideas of Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle with his postmodernist book Simulacra and Simulation — which momentarily appears in The Matrix, a film Paul muses on for several pages in Annihilation — to say that the copy of the original has now become the real.

Black and white illustration of a horned and winged creature surrounded by mystical symbols featured in Michel Houllebecq's novel Annihilation.
From Michel Houellebecq’s Annihilation.

The true sadness, then, comes when the mask falls off the copy and we realise the sleight of hand that’s taken place. It would be cosplay to live like the real we mourn, because it died during our obsession with its electronic reproductions.

While not fleshed out in the story, a drawing in Edouard’s notebook, found after his stroke, permits a fitting epitaph to Baudrillard and Houellebecq’s postmodernism.

Bruno Juge’s deepfake, created by cyberterrorists, prompts investigators to find out if the video is real. But politics and religion are now nostalgic simulations, along with most other things like suicide, sex and parenthood, amidst the personal suffering.

Here Paul considers his marriage to his wife Prudence:

Parents’ love of their children is well attested, it’s a kind of natural phenomenon, particularly in women; but children never respond to that love and are never worthy of it, children’s love of their parents is absolutely against nature. If by some misfortune they had had a child, Paul reflected there would never have been a chance of getting back together with Prudence. As soon as the child reaches the shores of adolescence, the first task assumed by the child is to destroy the couple formed by its parents, and in particular to destroy it in sexual terms; the child cannot under any circumstances bear its parents engaging in sexual activity, particularly with each other, it logically considers that from the moment of its birth that activity has no longer any reason to continue, and is henceforth only a disgusting old people’s vice.

Annihilation isn’t as bleak as Atomised and The Map and the Territory. And while Houellebecq mourns the loss of hope, he does take a shot at it, despite knowing his fans will likely see it as a loss of machismo.

In his ‘Thanks’, he says Annihilation is his last book, making it a very on-brand form of self-immolation at the age of 68: Michel Houellebecq finally admits he’s holding on to love.

Michel Houellebecq Annihilation translated by Shaun Whiteside Picador 2024 PB 544pp $34.99

Born and raised in Melbourne, James Arbuthnott is a business journalist and book critic based in Sydney whose work has appeared in ArtsHub. Find him on Bluesky.

You can buy Annihilation from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

You can also check if it is available from Newtown Library.

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Tags: Atomised, fiction in translation, French fiction, French politics, Guy Debord, Jean Baudrillard, Michel | Houellebecq, political thriller, Shaun | Whiteside


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