The borderline Aspergers being over-represented in the Males from Hale, the men-only reading group I frequent, scores are assiduously kept on our resident accountant's Crackberry. In answer to my Stato-like query as to which book had the historic highest mark, Atomised by Michel Houellebecq turned out to be the winner. So I bought it for my wife at Christmas. She hated it. "Give me Jane Austen any day", she grumbled after thirty pages, tossing it over to my side of the bed.
I have just finished it. From the reviews plastered on the cover I was expecting a cross between the King James Bible, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Joy of Sex. Only better. Sadly not. Atomised tells the miserable life stories of two French half brothers Bruno and Michel, abandoned by their hippy mother in childhood. Bruno turns out an inadequate sex pest; Michel an unfeeling scientist. The West, Houellebecq tell us, has given itself over to a cult of individualism. The more selfishly we behave, the more unhappy we are. Bruno and Michel are certainly unhappy. Michel's researches lead him to opportunities for cloning humans, and at the end of the book (spoiler coming) we learn that humans are obsolete and have created their genetic successors, free from weltschmertz and fear.
So far, well, quite interesting. There is, if you like that kind of thing, a great deal of rumpy-pumpy. I guess if you want to say that people are having a lot of empty sex with people about whom they care nothing, you have to show them actually doing so. Which Houellebecq obligingly does, page after tedious page. This palled fairly quickly for me.
Then there's the technical problem of how, if your novel is essentially one of ideas, you weave those ideas in without lecturing. Astonishingly, Houellebecq makes almost no attempt to do this, so there are endless passages which read like a pamphlet, sometimes with the narrator addressing the reader directly, sometimes half-heartedly stuck into a scene such as the one in which the half-brothers tell each other about Aldous Huxley. It is quite extraordinarily lazy and often very boring.
Neither is Houellebecq's book free from internal implausibilities and contradictions. An early teenage admirer of Michel's, whom he unaccountably failed to shag at the time, turns up after 25 years and still carries a torch for him. "I just want you to give me a baby", she says (a characteristic piece of Houellebecq dialogue). She is beautiful, of course. After an accident, Bruno's sex-buddy becomes disabled, and throws herself down the stairs in her wheelchair when he hesitates a fraction of a second too long before agreeing to look after her. We never find out exactly how Michel's human cloning manages to do away with all the painful aspects of life-before-death. Nor why humanity, of which the tortured Michel and Bruno are not exactly typical, was willing to connive in its own obsolescence.
All of which is a shame, because Houellebecq is right about lots of things. We are obsessed with the idea of personal freedom, often with devastating results. Atomised is mercifully free of PC so hardly anyone escapes a kicking. There are some odd patches of truly luminous writing. But reading the gushing blurb (Julian Barnes in particular should have known better) I was struck by how fearful are critics of discovering they have failed to get on the right bandwagon. And learning that the book had won Houellebecq the Prix Novembre, it occurred to me that bad novelists everywhere should take heart - Will Self, David Baddiel, Jeffrey Archer - nil desperandum: one day all this could be yours.
