That Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel is about sex and death will surprise no one. Particularly after “Submission,” one cannot but approach each new novel of the 65-year-old writer as you would a not too well-meaning oracle. What news does his 2021 novel “Annihilate” bring from the future? Death and more death in all its multifarious forms: death of the nation, death of the “occident” and death of the straight white male. But there is good news too. France becomes the leading car manufacturer in Europe. Considered alongside Julia Ducournau’s “Titane” (2021), one wonders if there is a new “automotive turn” in French storytelling.
“Annihilate” sticks very close to its title. The book opens with the scene of an execution, which reveals itself to be a digitally engineered video of the execution of a French minister. This is an interesting device that Houellebecq uses in this novel – videos, dreams and future projections blend in the narrative and you have to do the legwork to identify which is which. The execution video is the starting point of the Houellebecquian arc, where the hero, Paul Raison who works at the ministry, is confronted with a crisis at the capital, and then personal circumstances take him to the provinces. His father has had a stroke and so a family reunion has to take place in Beaujolais where we sample the menu of social unease in France.
Before we set off, we learn that both Paul and his beloved minister Bruno are estranged from their wives. Paul’s domestic situation is more awkward than Bruno’s because he continues to share the same apartment with his wife, Prudence, and we learn about the estrangement when Paul refers to his and her fridges in the same apartment. There doesn’t seem to be anything attractive in either of the fridges because, you know, French people, whom the world thinks as consummate gourmets, don’t cook anymore. Actually, I am being nice. It’s because, as Houellebecq harps on in all his novels, it is French women who do not cook anymore, leaving French men at the mercy of Moroccan takeouts.
This obsession of Houellebecq is further explored in one of the characters, that of Cecile, Paul’s sister, who is a professional caterer and a Catholic to boot. Houellebecq tries to test whether Cecile’s professional, domestic and religious arrangements are the answer to the “impasse of the French womanhood” as he sees it. There are, as you can imagine, no easy answers in Houellebecq, because, as we see later, Cecile is not happy cooking for people who do not appreciate her food as it should be appreciated. To get pleasure out of cooking she ought, of course, to be cooking for her husband and for free, and then she wouldn’t end up crying after every gig she takes on. It soon becomes clear that the husband, Herve, is not the ideal audience either because he comes from a family of “chomeur,” a family of chronic unemployment, a concept Paul finds difficult to understand. The novel is told in the third person but Houellebecq peppers the narrative with “Paul said to himself” so it really reads like a first-person account.
Back in his childhood home waiting to see which way his father will go – death or life? – Paul reconnects with his younger self, musing on the impact that Kurt Cobain and "The Matrix" had on him. Looking at the film’s poster on his boyhood wall, he realizes, all of a sudden, that Prudence looks like Carrie-Anne Moss. At this point in the novel, I think there might be a genre shift, that Houellebecq may try something new. Dreams, digitally produced executions that can hardly be told apart from the real one... is our hero living in a simulated world? But Houellebecq is too rooted in the body to take us to the virtual plane. Paul’s father is dying at a hospital, the woman he once loved is wearing kid’s pajamas and not sexy ones, which causes him great distress because he reads this as Prudence having forgotten she has a body.
To prove to the reader that he means what he says, Houellebecq has the terrorists attack a Danish sperm bank. I had to rewind the audiobook and listen to the section again to check. Turns out Denmark does have the largest sperm bank in the world and that it is very popular, among others, with the British ladies. This, then, is what “annihilation” of the Occident looks like: the wiping out of whitest and blondest of genes. While on the other side of the channel women are after having Viking babies – I am looking at you, Netflix! – Paul’s sister-in-law has gone and ordered black sperm and now has a Gucci baby (I’m sorry, you’ll have to watch all “Absolutely Fabulous” episodes to get that joke). Not only are they not cooking at home and instead eating tajines, they are also having African children, these unruly French women.
In “Annihilate,” the white body is under attack everywhere, but particularly when it is aged. Paul’s father is now paralyzed and not getting the personal care his children think he should. In a moment of actual action, the siblings decide to save their dad from the clutches of the state system, so he can live his remaining days at home. This happens in an elaborate heist-like sequence and is engineered by a “patients’ rights” group that is legal just by the skin of their teeth. The group is introduced to the family by none other than the irredeemable “chomeur” Herve, who, I guess, is redeemed by his role in this orchestration.
Just as you think he’ll leave Muslims well alone in this one, Houellebecq has Paul wander around town where “there are many Arabs on the street.” Just so we don’t get completely bogged down in the provinces, we take trips to Paris, where the administration is trying to figure out who is behind the attacks. There is much talk about pentagrams and pentagons and Baphomet (Old French version of "Mahomet") and how they are all connected to the imagery that the terrorist group seems to be using. Paul “says to himself” that there are too many signs that don’t add up so it’s difficult to read the political objectives of the group. There are even connections to the new age religion that Prudence has been practicing, which has turned her into a sexless puppet. But the greater clue as to the identity of the group seems to be with the paralyzed father, who used to work for French intelligence and whose last dossier seems to contain figures and numbers that correspond to the code used by the group for online attacks. However, these are all points that are raised but never resolved in the novel.
You feel, by this point, that like “The Matrix” series, Houellebecq has reloaded his previous content, and the last chapter has a shift in which Paul, after having described and pondered the forms of death he is surrounded with, starts to think of his own mortality, after – excuse the spoiler – being diagnosed with cancer of the mouth. There are graphic and uncomfortable descriptions of the possible deteriorations and the kind of operations that need to be done, which will involve the removal of his tongue. Yes, reader, he means what he says. After the annihilation of the political class of France, after the annihilation of white and blonde DNA, the book closes with the annihilation of the voice of the white male.
And just like in the Wachowski franchise, in this latest installment, it is love that gives the hero any hope that life has been worth living, and that whatever time is left will be worth living. This love, as it must in a Houellebecq novel, is expressed by his wife abandoning kids’ pajamas and walking around the house in a bikini, or with no clothes at all. This might well be a parting shot by Houellebecq lampooning certain versions of the afterlife. But really, such domestic arrangements are too common in his oeuvre to write off as a mere caricature. We take these risks when we read him, and chacun a son paradis!
