3,292 words

Michel Houellebecq
Annihilation
Translation by Shaun Whiteside
London: Picador, 2024

In terms of its emotional impact, Annihilation is Michel Houellebecq’s finest novel. In his previous works, Houellebecq created and perfected a new genre of sorts: novels whose settings are worlds in decline, whose protagonists are utterly petty and impotent in the face of evil, and whose stories make me want to slit my wrists. Annihilation is different, though. It made me weep a bit for the protagonist before wanting to slit my wrists..

In Annihilation, Houellebecq has delivered a novel whose protagonist is slowly awakening from trivial egoism and emotional repression. Decency and even nobility are stirring within him. Sadly, it is too late to save his life, much less improve the world. In the end, Annihilation offers no solutions, just a few hints that the reader might build upon. But this is Houellebecq at his cheeriest.

It seems strange that Houellebecq’s most hopeful novel is called Annihilation, but nihilism is the unifying theme of his work.

James Cameron’s Titanic was silly, but one scene stayed with me: when the ship’s engineer unfurls the blueprints and explains that, given the nature of the ship and the collision she had suffered, compartment after compartment will fill with water, and—no matter what they do from that point forward—Titanic will founder.

Likewise, in novels like The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq unfurls the blueprints of modern society and the human soul, explaining that modern nihilism—religious disenchantment, liberalism, individualism, consumerism, hedonism, feminism, sexual revolution, birth control, technology, capitalism, globalization—will lead inexorably to the degradation and eventual extinction of the human race. Beside Houellebecq stand thinkers like Vico, Nietzsche, Spengler, and Heidegger, all anatomists of decadence and men of the Right.

In Annihilation, however, it is hinted that even nihilism can be annihilated.

Annihilation is a combination of political intrigue and family drama. It is set in France in 2026 and 2027. Its protagonist is Paul Raison (Paul Reason). Raison is chief advisor to Finance Minister Bruno Juge (Bruno Judge), a mandarin who, under an unnamed center-Left President, has revived France’s economy through protectionist measures.

Juge is targeted by cyberterrorists, who release a video showing him being guillotined. The video, of course, is fake. But its level of technical perfection is far beyond the industry standard, indicating that the people behind it have formidable skills and resources. The same terrorists also employ considerable resources and sophistication to destroy a Chinese container ship and a Danish sperm bank.

The French General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI) first suspects Left-wing terrorists, perhaps ecoterrorists. When the sperm bank is destroyed, they suspect Catholic militants. But then the same group sinks a boat carrying 500 African migrants across the Mediterranean, machine-gunning the survivors. After that, they firebomb a secret laboratory in Ireland working on fusing human neurons with machines.

The DGSI then begins working up a new profile. Killing migrants sounds like white racists. So does destroying a Chinese cargo ship. Destroying a sperm bank and a laboratory fusing man and machine could be the work of Christian humanists, but it is also anti-technological and pro-nature. Maybe, then, they are dealing with ecoterrorists of the Right: eco-Nazis.

Ted Kaczynski and Savitri Devi are offered as examples. Both were deep ecologists. Both were also intellectually on the Right. Kaczynski didn’t advertise that fact, but he spent a good deal of time criticizing Leftism from a vitalist point of view that is very much consistent with the far Right. Savitri Devi was famous for turning National Socialism into a religion. A fusion of their ideas is definitely possible.

Of course, it isn’t a perfect fit. Kaczynski was a terrorist, but he wasn’t racist and would not have used high-tech means. Savitri Devi, moreover, was pro-technology and would never have blown up Nordic sperm. Neither of them, moreover, would have a special animus for a French finance minister who was against free trade. It is also suggested that the terrorists fund their operation by shorting the stocks of the companies they attack. This is clever, but I can’t imagine Savitri Devi or the Unabomber going in for such a thing. Finally, the terrorists use the Baphomet as a symbol. But Kaczynski had no truck with esotericism, and Savitri Devi had little interest in Western esotericism, especially anything smacking of Satanism.

Nevertheless, it is quite possible that both Kaczynski and Savitri Devi could have inspired such a movement, even though they would have disavowed aspects of its program and methods. As one intelligence analyst put it, “Today more than ever, power resides in intelligence and knowledge; and these ultra minority ideologies are the very ones likely to attract superior minds” (p. 391).

What is their goal? In the long-term, a better world. But in the short term, they may content themselves with simply “creating chaos, convinced that the resulting world would be a better one” (p. 391). This is not really nihilism. Indeed, the present system is nihilism. The terrorists, instead, are operating on the faith that after nihilism is annihilated, order and goodness will spontaneously reassert themselves.

Houellebecq’s novels Submission, Serotonin, and now Annihilation show that the author has a more than casual acquaintance with the far Right: both canonical counter-Enlightenment thinkers like Maistre, Nietzsche, and Spengler, as well as less well-known figures like René Guénon, Savitri Devi, and Ted Kaczynski (all of whom he mentions by name; he also mentions René Girard). (I wonder if Houellebecq used my website, the Savitri Devi Archive, in his research.)

Houellebecq also refers to such Rightist movements and organizations as the identitarians, Civitas, and the National Front, now the National Rally. For instance, Paul’s sister Cécile and her husband Hervé—“a monster of integrity, fidelity, and virtue” (p. 66)—are National Rally supporters, Tolkien fans, and believing Catholics. Hervé, moreover, had been a far-Right militant and still maintains contacts in that milieu, which come in handy in the story, when Paul needs someone to rescue his father from a hospital where he is being neglected. Houellebecq depicts Cécile and Hervé as decent and healthy people, in fact the only healthy couple in the whole book.

Interestingly enough, both Paul and Bruno himself have many views congruent with the National Rally. Paul, for example, hates jihadis and is disconcerted by the Great Replacement. He picks an Arab dentist only to avoid a Jewish one. He welcomes modern neopagan celebrations of masculinity.

Bruno, for his part, reads Spengler and Maistre, embraces nationalist economic measures, and has no illusions about migrants. The attack on the migrant boat created a shift in public opinion, which caused the National Rally to lose the second round of the French presidential election to a Zelensky-like center-Left candidate named Sarfati, a vulgar television comedian whose Sephardic Jewish surname means “French.” Bruno is pleased that his party won. But he is also pleased that the terrorist attack will cause a downturn in immigration, which will make it easier to govern.

Both Paul and Bruno are distressed and puzzled by the collapse of marriage, family, and all forms of intimate relations. Sexlessness and loneliness are rising dramatically while birthrates are cratering.

They had definitely screwed up, [Paul] said to himself, they had collectively screwed up somewhere. What was the point of installing 5G if you simply couldn’t make contact with one another anymore, and perform the essential gestures, the ones that allow the human species to reproduce, the ones that also, sometimes, allow you to be happy? (p. 259)

Elsewhere, Paul muses that society depends on two institutions that are collapsing, yet there are no replacements in the offing nor any attempt to halt their decline:

Family and marriage: those were the two residual poles around which the lives of the last Westerners were organized in the first half of the 21st century […] The liberal doxa persisted in ignoring the problem, in the naïve belief that the lure of material gain could be substituted for any other human motivation and could on its own supply the mental energy necessary for the maintenance of a complex social organization. This was quite plainly false, and it seemed obvious to Paul that the whole system was going to come crashing down, even if one could not at present predict the date or the manner in which this might occur—but the date could be close, and the manner violent. So he found himself in that strange situation in which he was working steadily, and even with a certain devotion towards the maintenance of a social system which he knew was condemned beyond repair, and probably not in the very long term. (p. 383)

Bruno too is increasingly occupied with the question of decadence:

There was also something else, a dark and secret force which might be psychological, sociological or simply biological in nature, it was impossible to know what it was, but it was terribly important because everything else depended on it, both demographics and religious faith, and finally people’s desire to stay alive, and the future of their civilizations. The concept of decadence might have been a difficult one to figure out, but it remained a powerful reality; and what was more, perhaps more importantly, politicians were incapable of influencing it. (p. 430)

Indeed, Paul actually wonders why Bruno does not support the National Rally, given his convictions. Paul could ask the same about himself. When he goes to cast a vote for Sarfati, he freezes then discards the ballot. He refuses to vote for the comedian, but he won’t vote for the National Rally either.

In truth, Paul hankers after something even more radical. As he learns more about the terrorists, something terrible dawns on him: “the worst thing was that if the terrorists’ goal was to annihilate the world as he knew it, to annihilate the modern world, he couldn’t entirely blame them” (p. 223).

There is a great deal of inspired and cutting satire in Annihilation. But it is directed entirely at the establishment, never at the Right.

I found the political thriller aspect of Annihilation quite fascinating, but it ran out of steam four-fifths of the way through the book. The terrorists taunted the authorities by releasing cryptic clues about their targets. The locations of the first four attacks corresponded to four points of a pentagram. The fifth point, therefore, gave away the location of their next attack: an island off Croatia where leading tech developers were planning to meet (very much the sort of people Ted K. would have liked to blow up).

Frankly, the whole pentagram device is more worthy of Dan Brown than Houellebecq. Real ecoterrorists would never have telegraphed their intentions like that, and they would have hit their most important target first, before rather than after the world knew of their existence.

In fact, the whole thing seemed so implausible that I suspected Houellebecq was setting us up for a plot twist in the last act. Maybe this was a ruse to throw the DGSI off track. Or maybe the “superior minds” attracted to this ideology were regime insiders, men with serious doubts like Paul or Bruno. But, sadly, Houellebecq just drops the whole thing, wasting a great deal of dramatic potential.

Instead, Houellebecq shifts his focus to the personal aspect of Annihilation, namely the life of Paul Raison. Paul and his wife Prudence are both children of French officials from the baby boom generation. Paul’s father worked for the DGSI. Prudence’s father was a judge. Both sets of parents were cold, selfish, and wrapped up in their work. Thus Paul and Prudence were relatively neglected and grew up like their parents, but even more emotionally damaged.

When the novel begins, Paul and Prudence are childless, even petless, and approaching fifty. They have been estranged for half their marriage, sleeping in separate bedrooms. They haven’t had sex in six years. They barely talk to their parents, their siblings, or even one another. Given the character of Prudence’s father, we are told, “there was nothing surprising about her turning out asexual and vegan” (p. 368). She was not named after a classical virtue. She was named after a Beatles song.

Both Paul and Prudence begin to thaw, however, when tragedy strikes their fathers. Paul’s mother had been dead for ten years when his father, Edouard, had a massive stroke which left him almost completely paralyzed and in a hospital. Edouard’s partner, Madeleine, and his highly religious daughter, Cécile, rally to his aid. They are joined by Paul’s younger brother Aurélien, who is also emotionally repressed and in a loveless marriage with a journalist who is a memorably drawn monster.

Perhaps their father’s brush with death shocked Paul and Aurélien into confronting the emptiness of their lives, but their courses of action were probably inspired by Madeleine and Cécile, both of whom are founts of selfless devotion sustained by a religious hope for the future.

Madeleine, in particular, had a very sad life. She had every reason to feel self-pity and self-absorption, yet she manifested only love, patience, and hard work. “Thinking of Madeleine’s broken life,” Paul “was filled by a wave of compassion so violent he had to turn away to keep from crying” (p. 154). This is a dramatic turn for such a cold fish.

As Paul learns more about his father’s relationship with Madeleine, he realized that “his father plainly had access to levels of human experience that remained unknown to him” (p. 168)—things as mundane as having a joint checking account with his wife.

Similarly, Prudence’s cold father revealed a depth of feeling she did not think possible when his wife was killed in an accident, after which he simply shrugged off his life and waited to join her.

For the first four-fifths of the novel, the story of Paul and his family is every bit as fascinating as the political side. We watch with wonder as elementary particles like Paul, Prudence, and Aurélien begin to glom on to one another. They begin to open their souls and enjoy real human relationships once they enter the force-fields around their fathers, both of whom now transformed from selfish baby boomers into semi-catatonic Chakravartins. (They have not changed that much. Their self-absorption has simply been intensified to such a pitch that others must take care of them. Caring for others, however, is transformative.)

Of course, there are larger agglomerations of elementary particles than families, namely societies. Thus I thought and hoped that Houellebecq would bring the personal and political themes of the story together in the form of Paul’s political awakening. But given the direction Paul was going, maybe Houellebecq thought that impolitic.

Unfortunately, Houellebecq’s resolution of the personal side of the story is almost as anticlimactic as the political. Paul is promptly diagnosed with cancer of the mouth and jaw. The treatment is ghoulish. They propose to remove his jaw. But don’t worry, they can cut some bone from his scapula and whittle it into a new jaw. Yes, they will also remove his tongue, but they can replace it with a chunk of meat from another part of his body. No, he won’t be able to taste food or talk. But it’s a small price for a Frenchman to pay for a 25% chance of survival over the next five years. Paul makes the right decision. He opts for less drastic treatments. But eventually, the cancer is going to kill him anyway.

Throughout the whole ordeal, Paul and Prudence grow increasingly close. Their relationship is very moving, but Houellebecq’s decision to dwell on their sex life is, frankly, grotesque. Love may have the power to make a 50-year-old woman in hot pants—or an emaciated man with mouth cancer—seem sexy. But Houellebecq’s prose doesn’t. In these spots, I feel that Annihilation is slipping back into the extreme pessimism and misanthropy of Houellebecq’s earlier works.

Paul and Prudence find that love can sustain them in the face of death, but they realize that something more was needed for them to actually live: belief. Prudence wonders to Paul, “We weren’t really made for living, were we?” Paul thinks she is right but rejoices that at least he was ending his journey through the world in her company.

“I don’t think it was in our power to change things,” Paul replies. In this context, “living” means the power “to change things.” In the novel, other people have that power: Madeleine; Cécile, Hervé, and their identitarian friends; the eco-terrorists. But all of them are sustained by belief. Paul and Bruno were powerful men, but lacking conviction, at most they have the power to manage their decline.

“No, my darling,” Prudence replies. “We would have needed wonderful lies” (p. 523). And there’s the rub. In the novel, Paul has dabbled with Catholicism and Prudence with Wicca. But no matter how much they needed belief, their search was crippled by the premise that any sort of deep and life-changing conviction is untrue. Maybe they are “wonderful lies,” but they are lies nonetheless.

In short, Paul and Prudence Reason are rationalists. But Paul is also convinced that rationalism is deadly:

In fact, Paul reflected, that girl [his niece Anne-Lise] was leading her life with her remarkable degree of intelligence and rationality. He didn’t think that in the long term rationality was compatible with happiness, in fact he was almost certain that in every case it led to complete despair; but Anne-Lise was still far from the age where life forces us to make a choice and, if she was still capable of doing so, to bid farewell to reason. (p. 383)

Nietzsche’s most interesting genealogy traces how reason becomes an idol to which people are willing to sacrifice their lives. Paul, it seems, is not capable of bidding farewell to reason, even though it makes him unhappy. In the context of the story, of course, there would be no point, because he is on the brink of death.

You can find this essay and many others in Greg Johnson’s book Novel Takes: Essays on Literature, available for order here

“Prudence,” of course, is another word for reason, namely practical reason. For thinkers like Kant and William James, practical reason can put theoretical reason in the service of life. But our Prudence is named after a Beatles’ song, so maybe there’s no redemption there.

Is the “message” of Annihilation—its “moral,” even—that we should all “bid farewell to reason” while we still have a chance to live? Is simple belief—belief in anything—Houellebecq’s prescription for overcoming the malaise of modernity?

I hope not, because it seems simplistic. Even when you realize that individual freedom, sexual promiscuity, and capitalist plenty don’t really make us happy, the main thing that keeps liberalism in place is fear: fear of the stupid, crazy, and evil things that religious believers do, things like the Thirty Years War.

We are not just suffering from too much reason but from too much freedom. We are in the grip of the idea that we have infinite real choices, so many choices, in fact, that we need reason to select amongst them, lest we be “arbitrary.” But that’s a false picture.

Practically everything important about us is unchosen: our families, our genes, the nation and time we are born into, etc. Liberals call such traits “accidents” of birth, as if they are inessential to who we are, when actually they define who we are. Our most fundamental choice is to own up to this fact or to flee it.

In Annihilation, the most admirable characters, Cécile and Hervé, embrace and care for the world that is given to them, including their family, religion, and national identity. They do it with a sense of gratitude. The miserable characters—Paul, Prudence, Aurélien, and their selfish boomer parents—all had other plans.

In both personal and political terms, Annihilation presents identitarianism as the fundamental alternative to nihilism. That’s an extraordinary message to receive from one of the world’s most prominent novelists.