Orion £12.99 pp345

Michel Houellebecq courts controversy so assiduously — describing Islam as an “absurd religion”, filling his books with graphic depictions of sex and violence, offending political correctness of all shades — that it is easy to forget to take him seriously as a writer. But he is much more than a literary shock-jock. His range of targets seems to expand with every book, while his deeply negative vision of modern humanity is consistently reinforced. From consumer society, through sexual commodification and hypocrisy, to religious belief and even democratic politics, his fiction has charted a violent dissatisfaction with a shallow, infantilised world. And while his novels can be blackly humorous or frankly eroticised, and, in their English editions, at least, tend to appear between rather trashy covers, the surface belies a complex philosophical engagement.

In The Possibility of an Island, Houellebecq’s rage against the world is taken to its logical extreme. The novel reflects on the replacement of humanity itself as a successful species, enacting over a period of centuries a “terrifying”image of Schopenhauer: “human existence resembles a theatre performance which, begun by living actors, is ended by automatons dressed in the same costumes”. The protagonist is Daniel, a popular French comedian who has made his name by “behaving like a complete bastard with impunity”, attacking almost anything his audiences might hold dear, though the sketches and projects he describes sound offensively unfunny. But despite his success and the wealth it brings, he is tired of the cruelty of laughter. This fatigue will drive him into two failed attempts at love and, eventually, a leading part in the success of a cult that wishes to replace humanity with a better version, based on cloning.

The novel alternates between Daniel’s account and that of two of his cloned successors, 2,000 years from now, Daniel 24 and 25: their numbers indicate their generational distance from the first Daniel. The chapters in which the future Daniels describe their “neo-human” existence suffer from many of the drawbacks of science fiction, particularly when such a vastly different world from ours is being imagined. The variables are so great that the existence of any connections between the present and the future, even one genetically linked as the Daniels’ is, seems arbitrary. And the character of the new reality Houellebecq describes is devoid of the features that give his writing its bite and energy. Fundamentally, the neo-humans live isolated, non-social existences — making reading about them as thrilling as leafing through a technical manual to a nonexistent machine whose very purpose remains obscure.

Nevertheless, there is a compelling inexorability about the process of self-destruction that Houellebecq charts in the original Daniel. He pursues one beautiful woman but finds that he is only interested in sex with her, while she has fallen in love. His next affair turns the tables: no matter the rapture of his sexual exploits with his new lover, he craves an intimacy of which she, young and oblivious, cannot conceive. This is Daniel’s tragedy: the same, usually fruitless search for love that has been more delicately, if not more honestly described at least since Plato. But the unashamedly one-dimensional portrayal of the two women, seen as little more than objects of “penetration” (a word that appears with disconcerting frequency, as if to emphasise the purely anatomical nature of any connection between his characters), together with the offensiveness of the original Daniel, make the leap to the doom of species rather too easy to bear.

But to criticise The Possibility of an Island on these grounds is to ignore the fact that this is a novel of ideas (although Houellebecq has managed better before to combine ideas and a novelistic reality). True, it is sometimes not helped by a translation (by Gavin Bowd) that can be off-puttingly literal: Daniel’s lover describes herself as “psychorigid”, and Daniel decides against buying one car because “it was dearer” than another, which makes him sound more like a maiden aunt than a celebrity who appears on the cover of Radikal Hip-Hop magazine.

But in its presentation of a world-view, too, this novel suffers from overstretch. The view of humanity that emerges reduces to a crude version of evolutionary psychology, in which the influence of genetic preservation on human behaviour is paramount. In order to prove his point, Houellebecq is forced to exaggerate the vapidity of youth, the trials of family life, the horrors of old age so that they seem unrepresentative rather than honest. If everyone was as inconsolable and tough-minded as Daniel the first, then Houellebecq’s bleak vision of the far future might be connectable to his extreme version of the present. But, fortunately, they aren’t, and Houellebecq’s novel becomes more of a puzzle than a shock.

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