By dint of considering Michel Houellebecq as the more or less outrageous barometer of French society in our time and in the near future, his novels are expected as the Messiah. Especially since a marketing of a formidable efficiency precedes each laying. The release of his science fiction novel Submission, in 2015, on a France that had become a Muslim land, had it not coincided with the Islamist attack on the premises of Charlie Hebdo ? Oracle, Houellebecq? Not always, but a high-flying agitator and analyst capable of flashes as much as sweeping provocations.
Annihilate, the eighth novel of the “goncourisé” for The map and the territory, landed in Quebec bookstores. This uneven brick of 735 pages, which only finds its cruising speed at 150e, is it flying towards success with us? Less than in France, in any case. Its action, anchored in 2027, also ignores the pandemic as a vector of social upheaval. Thus, in this fiction, the author has given himself one less key to grasp the world of tomorrow, while placing medical issues at the center of his melancholic satire.
The polemicist has shorter teeth than yesterday. Is it a bad thing? He can be so obnoxious. We suddenly discover him more human, without seeing him put away his ambitions. His crystal ball shows him, through his alter ego, a wounded France (and the West, by extension), in need of balms. How can you contradict him on that?
No doubt he sees himself as a contemporary Balzac. He quotes his illustrious predecessor extensively in this novel. In the footsteps of the author of The human comedy, who had listened to his company between Paris and the province from 1829 to 1850, Houellebecq brandished his seismograph in the same Hexagon, but in the 21st century: almost two hundred years later. Lost illusions, of Balzac, was of a cynicism that the contemporary novelist hardly beats in the whole of his work, however sulphurous. Black humor connects these writers beyond their time bubbles and their respective styles. The parentage is real. With the clothes of the giant Balzac very big to put on, we feel implicitly the project of Houellebecq to follow in his footsteps. Already meritorious, this ambition to auscultate its time, even if it means getting stuck here and there in its laces. Through the mixture of genresAnnihilate — thriller, social and family Time.news, gritty comedy — Houellebecq ties together several intrigues. Leaving the political suspense segment in limbo, but why? His eternal existential malaise is nourished here by health trials suffered by the main character of a disillusioned civil servant as well as by his relatives. Sending back to back the fundamentalists of all persuasions, the ambient mediocrity, the benevolence of the caregivers and a woman whom he learns to love again, the writer gropes.
Annihilate embraces the quest for transcendence of a hero sorry to believe in no god when things go sour. Here is a Houellebecq that is softer than usual, less catchy, less sarcastic, but still convinced that the world is doomed. He distills his nostalgia, strikes at the political class, institutions of all stripes and the media, but with a velvet glove. Its misogyny and xenophobia are losing their virulence. They changed it for us.
This twilight novel, where illness and death lead the way, where threats of mass destruction are born on the Web before striking, aspires to tenderness and reconciliation. His best passages are the most amorous. Gestures of gentleness float above, which, failing to prevent disaster, make life bearable. Appeased, Houellebecq? In any case stripped of his sword and armor, thrown at his feet while undressing. Maturity has entered his body with death lurking around him. His contempt has dulled. No doubt he learned above all to put up with himself. The devil who has become old becomes a monk (or hermit, it depends), say the proverbs.
The writer breathes in the spirit of the times by clinging less firmly to the buoy of an ancient world to be preserved at all costs. We share some of his reflections by picking up elsewhere. This lame novel nevertheless becomes his most solar. As if Houellebecq saw that all the polarizations of today, drunk on excess, would soon hit a wall. We no longer speak of the extension of the domain of the struggle, but of that of kindness, the only one capable of assisting humans in Annihilate. Balzac came to the same conclusions in more religious times. France has not changed completely in two centuries, but its mount is racing and its landmarks are crumbling, as elsewhere. No wonder his famous oracle is so tired.