The Map and the Territory, Michel Houellebecq (translated by Gavin Bowd), William Heinemann, 304pp, £17.99 (hardback)

Michel Houellebecq’s personal history is as bewildering as it is inspiring. Michel Thomas, born on Réunion in 1956, published his first poems in La Nouvelle Revue de Paris in 1988 under the name Michel Houellebecq, ‘born in 1958’. The receptionist at La Nouvelle Revue was struck chiefly by his ‘sticky’ appearance. An I.T. worker in the French Ministry of Agriculture, who as a teenager had read exclusively science fiction, he was catapulted to literary fame by his 1998 novel Les particules élémentaires (Flammarion). ‘Je connais cette tête de masturbateur!’ exclaimed Pierre Maillot of the École Louis-Lumière, on seeing his former student in the papers. He quickly set about realising the dreams of his youth – obvious ones not excluded (‘I don’t sign books, only breasts’, he announced at the Frankfurt Book Fair). He became a film director – his adaptation of his own novel La Possibilité d’une île (Fayard, 2005) was dubbed ‘the possibility of a shipwreck’ by Swiss newspaper Le Temps – and a rockstar of sorts, chanting his poetry over backing music to sold-out houses in Paris.

An outspoken opponent of free love, and the cultural legacy of the sixties more generally, he has nonetheless published a detailed essay about adventures with his sometime wife Marie-Pierre in swingers’ clubs at Cap-d’Agde, and another talking us through a night spent with his trousers round his ankles impersonating ‘Sandrine’ – ‘Sécrétaire. 22A. Mignonne’ – on Minitel rose (a stone-age precursor of AdultFriendFinder. com). Fed up with Paris, in 2000 he bought a house in County Cork, from which periodically he has sent out despairing messages on his personal blog, accompanied by semi-nude photos taken of himself looking puffy and haggard. On YouTube there is a clip of him in front of an audienceof German academics responding to a tricky question by repeating ‘… ouais, mais…’, between drags on his cigarette, for a full two minutes. The combination of insolence and self-deprecation is in the end irresistible.

What’s more, his work seems to abound with signs pointing the reader back to Houellebecq the man. There is the profusion of protagonists named Michel, the similarity of narratorial tone from book to book – sometimes from character to character. There is the declaration at the beginning of his first novel, Extension du domaine de la lutte (Maurice Nadeau, 1994), that what follows is a succession of autobiographical anecdotes. There is Philippe Harel’s film version of Extension, made in close collaboration with the author, in which the actor-director has copied Houellebecq’s melancholic manner down to the circular motions of jaw and eyes, the tobacco-softened voice, and his habit of holding a cigarette between ring- and middle-finger. All in all, one can be forgiven for fearing that Houellebecq himself, and not just the narrator of his travelogue- style novella Lanzarote (Flammarion, 2000), once approached a German lesbian on a nudist beach with the line ‘«You look a good girl. May I lick your pussy?»’

So perhaps it is not surprising that French novelists writing under – or in opposition to – his influence have often included Houellebecq himself as a character in their books. The following brief extract from Marc-Édouard Nabe’s Une lueur d’espoir (Éditions du Rocher, 2001) is fairly typical:

Then Houellebecq ejaculated into the swimming pool, yelling, ‘Death to the Arabs!’

In any case, the latest in a long string of French writers to succumb to this trend is … Michel Houellebecq.

His new novel, La carte et le territoire (Flammarion), which won the coveted Goncourt Prize in November 2010 and was released in the UK as The Map and the Territory (Heinemann) in September 2011, follows a successful Parisian artist and photographer, Jed Martin, who has chronic problems with his boiler and his ageing father. We are introduced to him as he is about to fly to Ireland to meet celebrated novelist, Michel Houellebecq, who he has asked to write a text for the catalogue of his forthcoming exhibition. Houellebecq achieves the distance required to produce a self-portrait which is a lot funnier and rings a lot truer than the Houellebecq caricatures in other French novels. Jed seeks advice from Houellebecq’s real-life friend and fellow novelist, Frédéric Beigbeder, on what might convince the reclusive author to write him a text. ‘Well…’ says Beigbeder, ‘this might surprise you, because he doesn’t come across that way at all, but: Money.’ When Jed arrives on Houellebecq’s doorstep with a present, he is greeted with the words, ‘Just one bottle?’ Houellebecq ‘looked like an old, dying tortoise’, we are told. And you only have to look at the photo on the dust jacket to know just what he means.

In his previous novels Houellebecq has shown himself adept at imagining his way into other people’s professions. Business meetings and spreadsheet simulations are made positively gripping in Plateforme (Flammarion, 2001), which tells how two professionals, Jean-Yves and Valérie, turn a failing resort chain around by explicitly targeting sex tourists. The hero of Possibilité, Daniel, has made millions with his provocative comedy sketches (among them Let’s Drop Miniskirts on Palestine! and Munch on my Gaza Strip (my huge Jewish settler)) as well as some outrageous feature films, including The Social Security Deficit:

The first fifteen minutes of the film consisted of the unremitting explosion of babies’ skulls under the impact of shots from a high-calibre revolver – I had envisaged it in slow-motion, then with slight accelerations – anyway, a whole choreography of brains, à la John Woo; after that, things calmed down a bit.

Jed Martin’s prodigious artistic output gives Houellebecq ample opportunity for vignettes, all of which are vivid and memorable. In his ‘métiers’ series, for which, in the novel, Michel Houellebecq is commissioned to write a commentary, there is a painting entitled Bill Gates and Steve Jobs discussing the future of I.T.:

Jobs, though sitting cross-legged on the white leather sofa, appeared paradoxically as an incarnation of the austerity, the Sorge traditionally associated with protestant capitalism. There was nothing Californian in the way his right hand was hugging his jaw, as though to aid him in a difficult reflection, or in the way he was looking at his interlocutor, full of uncertainty.

The series also includes a touching portrait of the artist’s father on his last day at work, The architect Jean-Pierre Martin resigning as director of his company, and, ultimately, the highly sought-after Michel Houellebecq, writer, in which Houellebecq is caught ‘at the moment when he has just noticed a correction to be made to one of the manuscript pages on the desk in front of him’. In the painting ‘the author seems in a state of trance, possessed by a fury’.

Two characteristics of his writing have been honed to near-perfection in Houellebecq’s latest book. One is an impression of immense three- dimensional space in the way the story takes shape, generated by extreme variations in the narrative point of view. As with the telling of Michel Djerzinski’s scientific discoveries in Particules, so in Carte we are one moment following Jed Martin’s day-to-day progress from close to, the next listening to a summing up of his artistic career by a narratorial voice situated many hundreds of years in the future. Houllebecq is not afraid to swoop from one point of view to the other, sometimes within the space of a sentence. This bestows on the novel as a whole an aura of tranquillity. Rather than rattling along the track of time, we feel that, as when visiting a cathedral, we will be able to look again from another vantage point at details we have not yet fully digested: they will not have disappeared.

The other is a painterly genius for juxtaposition, key to Houellebecq’s distinctive tone. The effectiveness of at least some of these juxtapositions can be explained. There are, in the first place, his humorous displacements: the sudden switch to a strictly inappropriate register for comic effect. This can be as simple as mixing the learned with the vulgar – hardly a new idea, but something Houellebecq pulls off with special panache. In his essay ‘La fête’, a sociological-style catalogue of reasons why two or more people might gather together appears under the heading ‘Qu’est-ce Que je fous avec ces cons?’ (roughly: ‘What the fuck am I doIng WIth these IdIots?’).

Elsewhere the switch is to an amoral detachment bordering on autism. Here is Michel, narrator of Extension, on a conversation at a party in the Ministry of Agriculture:

After my third glass I came close to suggesting we leave together, go and fuck in some office; on the desk or on the carpet, it didn’t matter; I felt in a position to make the necessary gestures.

And this is secondary-school teacher Bruno’s train of thought in Particules, when he starts being attracted to his pupils:

I decided I might be in with a chance. A lot of their parents had to be divorced; I was convinced I could find a girl who was looking for a father figure.

When Jed Martin meets Houellebecq in Carte for the second time, after a long and worrying silence from the author, the narrator finds a neat, deadpan way of conveying his worst fears:

He was pretty smelly, but less than a corpse; things could have been worse, after all.

At the beginning of Particules there is a passage which combines humorous displacement with what – in the second place – we can call panning away for pathos. Michel Djerzinski has just returned to the flat where he lives alone after a short and sombre leaving party at the research centre from which he has retired. It is clear he will not stay in touch with any of his former colleagues, and now he finds his one companion on Earth, a canary, dead in its cage. The sense of sadness and isolation risks becoming unbearable:

After some thought, he put the bird’s body into a plastic bag, which he weighted with a bottle of beer, and dumped the lot in the rubbish chute. What was he supposed to do? Say a mass?

Though technically a distraction from the bare narration that precedes it, the joke in effect jerks the reader back into a scene from which they may have begun emotionally shielding themselves.

But in the most haunting cases of panning away for pathos one has the impression it is not the reader but Houellebeq’s narrative which is shielding itself, recoiling instinctively from a wound that is still too tender – that will always be too tender – to touch. This is true of the sudden shifts to biological description in Particules, such as in the narration of Michel’s half-brother Bruno’s childhood living with his grandparents. Living in Algiers, we are told, pedalling his tricycle along the thirty-metre hall of his grandparents’ apartment, Bruno ‘had come closest to true happiness’. All this was to change on the death of his grandfather, which sent his grandmother half mad and forced them to move to Marseille. But this is how events are initially narrated:

His grandfather died in 1967. In temperate climates, the body of a bird or mammal first attracts specific species of flies (Musca, Curtoneura), but once decomposition has begun to set in, these are joined by others, particularly Calliphora and Lucilia. Under the combined action of bacteria and the digestive juices disgorged by the larvae,

…and so on. The human level, it would seem, has become suddenly uninhabitable. It must be vacated immediately, and refuge sought elsewhere.

There is a similar moment in Carte, when Olga, a beautiful Russian woman Jed got to know at his exhibition of photos of Michelin maps, announces to him on a weekend away at Vault-de-Lugny that she is returning to Russia. The narrative immediately pans away around the breakfast room:

At that moment she was sampling a jam made of wild strawberry, and birds were chirping, indifferent to all human dramas, in the garden originally designed by Le Nôtre. A few metres away from them, a Chinese family were stuffing their faces with waffles and sausages.

It is only after a page and a half more, detailing the breakfast menu and reflecting on hotels in general, that the focus can return to what in the meantime has been too painful even to allude to:

‘You’re taking your time to reply…’ she said.

This is a uniquely touching and delicate piece of writing.

In the third place, the most striking juxtaposition in his writing is one noted by Dominique Noguez in an enlightening essay, ‘Le style de Michel Houellebecq’. Houellebecq’s prevailing tone of cool, nigh-on scientific, objectivity is interrupted at intervals by passages of ferocious invective, enhanced by an exuberant, neologistic use of French slang – ‘vachasse’, ‘sous-merde’, ‘pouffiasse karmique’. The cooler, objective tone broken up by this ‘«brutalité verbale»’ is, for its part, peppered with the numerous devices available in French for bringing a conversation back down to earth: enfin, bref, finalement, au bout de compte, en somme, après tout, il faut en convenir, and above all en fait – hence the title of Noguez’s book, Houellebecq, en fait (Fayard, 2003). We can add to the list quand même, meaning ‘even so’ or, colloquially, ‘let’s face it’, as in the remark in an interview with the magazine, Lire, which landed Houellebecq in court on a charge of incitement to racial hatred: ‘La religion la plus con, c’est quand même l’islam.’ (He was acquitted.)

Brutal invective and cool objectivity may not appear to belong together, but there is a clue as to the source of this combination’s power in Houellebecq’s first published book, H. P. Lovecraft (Éditions du Rocher, 1991), a biography of the American science fiction and fantasy author of that name. Houellebecq contends that the intensity and fascination of Lovecraft’s mature works, in which intricate biological-style descriptions of supernatural or extraterrestrial creatures sit beside narrative passages which crescendo to peaks of hysterical frenzy, can be traced directly to the development of the author’s racism. During his early years living in Providence, Rhode Island, explains Houellebecq, Lovecraft felt for people of non-Anglo-Saxon race no more than ‘a distant and benevolent contempt’.

This was to change in 1924 on his move to New York City. There, his situation became more and more desperate as he continually failed to hold down a job, let alone secure an income through his writing. Forced to live in the most squalid areas of the city, he now encountered close-up the non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants of whom he had previously had only a very indistinct conception. In his eyes ‘[t]hese foreign creatures became rivals, neighbours, enemies probably superior in the domain of brute force’. Where contempt is a static, comfortable emotion, fundamentally uninterested in its object, what Lovecraft now felt compelled him to study his new neighbours closely, as one studies an enemy one needs to destroy. This attention to the immigrant population of New York, described in colourful detail in letters to his friends and family, and the fierce emotion that inspired it, were, in Houellebecq’s view, what ‘nourished’ the fantasy and the frenzy of Lovecraft’s ‘grands textes’. ‘Ce qui est indiscutable,’ writes Houellebecq, ‘c’est que Lovecraft, comme on le dit des boxeurs, «a la haine».’ He ‘has the hate’.

This contrast between hatred and contempt is suggestive when one compares Houellebecq’s writing with that of French novelists from the decades before his arrival. Since the existentialists left the scene, the heirs of Robbe-Grillet’s ‘nouveau roman’ had filled Parisian bookshelves with novels of an involuted pseudo-poetic vacuity not easily imaginable if you have grown up on English writers. What prevailed was listy and repetitive, a sort of free-floating observation, disdainful of social reality or – at the limit – of saying anything at all. Here is Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant (Éditions de Minuit), which won the Goncourt Prize in 1984:

My life story doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist. There is never a centre. No path, no line. There are great expanses where one pretends there is someone – it’s not true, there’s no one.

Clarifying the aim of her book in light of this claim, the narrator goes on:

What I’m doing here is different, and the same.

There are words here – some of them with a certain resonance – but communication has failed.

Houellebecq’s characters have not just life stories but jobs, and live in flats in what is recognisable as contemporary Paris: a city paralysed by transport strikes, riven with banlieue violence, where bistros jostle with upmarket S/M clubs. If his novel-writing gestures towards another genre, it is generally not poetry – pseudo- or not – but the essay. Indeed, although Houellebecq began as a poet, there is not a single idea in his poems (apart from his prose poems, essentially paragraph fragments) which he has not expressed more precisely and more powerfully in an essay or novel. Take one of his least laboured alexandrines:

On a beau ne pas vivre, on prend quand même de l’âge

‘It’s all very well not living, you still get old.’

And compare this passage from Extension:

I’ve lived so little that I tend to imagine I’m not going to die; it seems improbable that a human life could be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself, that sooner or later something is going to happen. Big mistake. A life can very well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving no trace and no memory; and then all of a sudden they stop.

If what makes Houellebecq’s novels both more intense and more matter- of-fact than anything that has appeared in French for a long time is ‘la haine’, it is certainly not racial hatred that motivates his writing – though it does motivate some of his characters for short periods. He is hunting bigger game. Houellebecq’s target is modern Western civilisation. In particular, he believes that the ’68 movement led to an extension of pressurised competition from the economic sphere to the sphere of private life and sexuality. Sex, he believes, is now, no less than money, a ‘system of differentiation’ whose primary significance resides in the social hierarchy it establishes. Just as there are financial winners and financial losers, there are also sexual winners and sexual losers. Not only does ‘sexual liberalism’, the narrator of Extension tells us, ‘produce phenomena of absolute pauperisation’, it also makes love impossible and human life ultimately unbearable. The narrator of Particules, himself a member of a future ‘asexual and immortal species’, recalls ‘the meekness, the resignation, and perhaps even the secret relief’ with which the last members of the human race consented to their own extinction.

Integrating theoretic exposition into fiction is a hazardous business. It certainly leaves its scars on Houellebecq’s books, in which the author’s thoughts sometimes seem almost randomly apportioned among his characters. Most of his novels feature a highly theoretic conversation about halfway through which has the feel of a monologue. In Particules Michel just happens to have a book to hand which demonstrates a point Bruno has been making at length. At other times, though, theory and narrative are skilfully integrated. This is achieved through some believable scenes which are both central to the life story of a character and paradigmatic exemplars for the thesis advocated by the novel. Two cases in point are I.T. worker Tisserand’s devastating rejection by a teenage girl at a Christmas Eve disco in Extension, and Bruno’s agonising experiences at a New Age nudist camp in Particules. Both settings are plausibly presented as fora in which, under a variety of covers (does anyone actually like dance music, or believe in Tantric Zen?), modern man discovers, with fear and trembling, his place in the sexual hierarchy. With multiple perspectives already in place, such scenes allow Houellebecq’s narrative to swoop up to an explicitly theoretic vantage point, giving an already impressive architectural structure additional grandeur.

The theory itself may not always add up. We are left confused as to whether Houellebecq thinks of childhood as an oasis of innocence, poisoned by entry into the adult world, or as a period of animal brutality, happily brought to an end by society’s tightening grip. In addition, it seems bizarre to attack the ethos of the sixties by contrasting it with an oceanic Buddhism. The passages in which Houellebecq exhorts his readers to surpass the illusion of self, quoting liberally from Eastern religious texts, could be straight from Allen Ginsberg. And it is difficult to understand why he claims that ‘desire is evil’ when the story of Michel and Valérie in Plateforme shows exactly how sexual passion can enable two jaded human beings to find love. But, let’s face it, less coherent ideologies have sustained cathedrals in the past. All this can be forgiven when the result is a powerful synthesis like that of Particules, which culminates in a frenzied description of the death of the book’s villain, Janine Ceccaldi. This paradigmatic exemplar of everything the author hates about the legacy of the sixties is a soixante- huitarde with much, including her name, in common with Houellebecq’s own mother.

In La carte et le territoire, there is no doubt about it, the synthesis fails to materialise. The novel does contain general ideas and, sure enough, there is a monologue-like conversation halfway through about William Morris and Alexis de Tocqueville. But this time the theoretic material has little bearing on Houellebecq’s plot. One even suspects it is there to shock the French press with how centrist he is sounding: somewhere just to the right of Raymond Williams, a sort of anti-democratic arts-and-crafts socialism. There is a brief mention of ‘the general destruction of the human race’ on the final page, but the difficulties dealt with in this novel are not those of humanity in general, but those of Parisian artist, Jed Martin, in particular. And it is sometimes alarming how much of the book’s interest relies on the sense we are being let in on art-world gossip, ushered into a charmed milieu. The condensed roman policier which ensues when Houellebecq is found murdered – his shredded flesh arranged on the floor to form a Jackson-Pollock-like tableau – is a tangent ending in anticlimax.

Houellebecq’s techniques for synthesising exciting general ideas with sensitive narrative have attained their peak at the moment when he seems suddenly to have lost all need for them. This is the paradox of his latest book. The cathedral is imposing as never before, the vault spacious, each capital smooth and finished. Its whitewashed walls are calming to the eye.

But the Spirit has departed.