In his gripping new novel Annihilation, translated by Shaun Whiteside, the (in)famous French novelist Michel Houellebecq pictures a near-future France whose institutions—from families to hospitals to political parties—wobble on the brink of collapse. Sitting down to read a Houellebecq novel called Annihilation, I prepared myself to read a story that gets bleaker by the page. And the story does get bleak.
The novel’s protagonist, Paul Raison, an assistant to France’s finance minister, finds himself “in that strange situation in which he was working steadily, even with a certain devotion towards the maintenance of a system which he knew was condemned beyond repair…Those thoughts, however, far from keeping him awake at night, usually plunged him into a state of intellectual fatigue that led him quickly to sleep.”
And he sleeps alone. Although he lives with his wife Prudence, they lead separate lives and seem unable to work up enough passion to dislike each other.
While France sleepwalks into oblivion, a terrorist group with unclear motives posts videos online of both fake and real acts of violence, including a lifelike video of Paul’s boss losing his head by guillotine. The terrorists do not explain their actions or issue lists of demands. French intelligence cannot even place the group on a political map—at least in their choice of targets, they seem left wing and then right wing and then Catholic traditionalist and then neo-pagan.
Early in the novel, Paul’s father, a retired intelligence officer, suffers a stroke and loses his ability to communicate. Although estranged from his family, Paul visits his father’s home and works with his siblings and his father’s partner to put together a care plan. When they see their father is trapped in a nursing home whose austerity policies usher patients towards death, they turn in desperation to Paul’s working-class brother-in-law, who knows people who may or may not be part of French nationalist/ Catholic traditionalist paramilitaries. Whoever they are, Paul’s friends oppose the modern state and operate very efficiently.
Now, what about Paul’s wife, Prudence? In a plot development all but illegal in Houellebecq novels, Paul and Prudence slowly fall back in love. It seems Prudence is helped in her efforts to revive her marriage by her new interest in Wicca.
Finally, what about Paul’s increasingly ambitious boss, the finance minister Bruno Juge? Could Houellebecq be setting up a situation where the terrorists attack Juge and then Juge rides voters’ sympathy into the presidency? The book ends before such a situation could come to pass, but it seems possible.
Houellebecq keeps that plot moving, but in the final act he brings to the fore a storyline only hinted at earlier: Paul learns he is at least as sick as his father and will likely die within a year. All of Paul’s efforts, like my efforts as a reader, to solve riddles of violence, politics, and economics distracted from the plot that will end his story for good. A reader like me might take Houellebecq’s bait and focus on the text’s puzzles until he realizes he has not stopped to look at the big picture and to see the end is closer and different than he’d thought.
Annihilation, however, does not end with Paul’s diagnosis. Houellebecq has more story to tell. Questions of violence, politics, and economics continue to confront France and the rest of the world. No part of life stops to give way to any other part. Some questions are solved, some go unanswered, and some will not find their answers until the day after you die.
FICTION
Annihilation
By Michel Houellebecq, Translated from French by Shaun Whiteside
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published October 8, 2024
