Hello. I have made a new video on C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. This completes my series on the Ransom Trilogy (parts one and two can be found here and here).

This book is one of the most prophetic novels of the 20th century, and readers will note many similarities to our current progressive Regime, from SAGE to Starmer.

Hopefully this is worth watching whether you have read the book or not.

Let me know if you have any other requests for books to cover.

Best,
Nick

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For those who have asked for more book-related content, here is a new video on Perelandra, which is the second part of C.S. Lewis’s ‘Ransom Trilogy’ (my video on the first book, Out of the Silent Planet, can be found here).

Once again, I do not attempt to cover everything; instead I pick some key scenes and themes, as well as placing the book in its literary and biographical context.

You should be able to get something out of this whether you have read the book or not, and hopefully it will encourage people to read it.

Next I will complete the trilogy with the disturbingly prescient That Hideous Strength.

Best,
Nick

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Hello. Several of you have asked for videos on books that I’m reading. And as valued paid subscribers, I have made your wishes come true.

This is my first such video, or second if you count my last one, wherein I discussed C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man in the light of contemporary politics.

Here, I build upon that with a video on Lewis’s science fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet.

This one is more of a pure book review, though I do tie it to last week’s video, as sections of this book are closely related to The Abolition of Man.

I have not attempted a comprehensive study of the novel, but I have picked some salient quotes that reveal Lewis’s philosophical and theological worldview, and given an idea of the novel’s core themes, namely the Fall of the Angels and the Fall of Man.

Hope you like the video and get something out of it.

Happy New Year!
Nick

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This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality or the First Principles of Practical Reason or the First Platitudes, is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they posses…The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they had destroyed themselves. (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man)

I recently reread C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, and, though he was writing in 1943, his warning about the eschewing of traditional morality by ‘Conditioners’, who take it upon themselves to teach us the new ways, struck me as extraordinarily prescient.

Thus I have attempted a video on why we should all read this book, and how it applies to our current moment, where amoral elites threaten to destroy us.

I am sending this to my legendary paid subscribers only.

Happy Christmas!
Nick

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Today I want to take a quick break from politics to talk about nostalgia, sex, and serial killers.

In other words, I am reviewing a novel by Bret Easton Ellis.

Hardcore fans of this site may know that novels used to be my primary obsession, until somewhere along the way comedy took over, then politics. This means I have missed some of the more recent books from the only remaining living writers worth bothering with, notably Michel Houellebecq, J. M. Coetzee, my podcast guest Lionel Shriver, and of course Bret Easton Ellis, who last year produced what is probably his greatest work, a 600-page opus called The Shards.

I hesitate slightly recommending this book to a conservative audience due to the aforementioned murder and sex stuff. This is a concern I haven’t really felt before, but I suspect it is something that will increasingly become an issue as a divide emerges on the right between those who are inherently conservative and those who are simply rebelling against the prevailing culture.

It is by no means clear-cut, but I probably align more with the latter group. Hence when it comes to a writer like Bret Easton Ellis, whilst endless gay sex scenes are hardly my thing (let’s be very clear), and nor for that matter are horror and gore—I see these tropes as the obsessions and structural necessities one puts up with in an Ellis novel to get to the good stuff—I am no doubt more open to depictions of Gen X transgression than the more strictly conservative Zoomers, whose only relation to Bret Easton Ellis is probably some quasi-fascist ‘sigma male’ meme they posted featuring an image of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman.

Of course, I have no problem with people rejecting work due to its perceived degeneracy. I do it myself with most of the cultural sludge that has been pumped out post roughly 2010. But one also doesn’t want to slip into the philistinism sometimes associated with the right. An association that is perhaps unfair given the number of serious artists who have been conservative or even reactionary, but nonetheless, it persists.

Caveats out of the way, let us get onto the actual book.

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The fourth novel in my list is J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. A relatively mainstream choice, it is one of the few genuinely great novels to have won the Booker Prize. 

To me, it is Coetzee’s greatest work. The universities prefer things like Waiting for the Barbarians and Foe, because they fit most neatly into the category of ‘postcolonial literature’. There is nothing academics like more than to destroy art by cramming it into a political box.

Of course, Coetzee being a South African writing about South Africa, it doesn’t take that much cramming. The politics of South Africa is central to Disgrace, but there is far more going on beneath the surface, as the characters seem almost to insist on their own three-dimensionality, rejecting their potential status as political props.

There is also more going on on the surface, if you like, in Coetzee’s aesthetic achievements as a master stylist. We must always keep in mind that a novel is first and foremost a work of art, lest we fall into what Harold Bloom labelled the ‘school of resentment’—the Leftist academic obsession with viewing literature through the prism of various ‘isms’, a process that has effectively destroyed the study of literature in the West.

But let us now get into Coetzee’s great novel.

4. J. M. Coetzee - Disgrace

Published in 1999, Disgrace almost suffers from being too prescient; its far-sightedness in danger of being rendered banal by the daily horrors and absurdities of 2024. Attacks on white farmers in South Africa, for example, are now so commonplace and so horrific that the novel risks losing some of its symbolic resonance, especially given that the same subject matter is now fodder for conservative media documentaries. And rightly so, but Disgrace is not a documentary.

Coetzee, however, resists proselytising for any particular side, as he honours the harsh reality of his country, and the radically different perspectives of his characters.

Even more prescient than the violence of the novel’s second half is the sex scandal that comprises its first act. Coetzee appears to have predicted both the ‘metoo’ movement and cancel culture with unnerving accuracy in the university’s treatment of protagonist and ‘disgraced’ professor, David Lurie. 

Following a reckless affair with a student, Lurie becomes a victim of the mob:  

The gossip-mill, he thinks, turning day and night, grinding reputations. The community of the righteous, holding their sessions in corners, over the telephone, behind closed doors. Gleeful whispers. Schadenfreude. First the sentence, then the trial.

All that has really changed since the time this was written is the technology. No one would bother making a phone call when they can destroy you with a single tweet.

Radical feminism is also very much in effect, as we learn that:

On campus it is Rape Awareness Week. Women Against Rape, WAR, announces a twenty-four-hour vigil in solidarity with ‘recent victims’. A pamphlet is slipped under his door: WOMEN SPEAK OUT. Scrawled in pencil at the bottom is a message: YOUR DAYS ARE OVER, CASANOVA.

One can almost picture the YouTube video. Jordan Peterson screaming at entitled young women about Marxism and Carl Jung.

Early hints of what we now call ‘woke’ are also present. At his university hearing, Lurie is accused of offering “No mention of the pain he has caused, no mention of the long history of exploitation of which this is part.”

His automatic guilt by way of his very existence as an ageing white man may have still been somewhat particular to South Africa in 1999, but has now become universal Western doctrine. 

Lurie offers various statements and confessions, but it is not enough: his interrogators want to know his intent, read his mind. Like the woke, like all true tyrants, they want him to genuinely embrace his re-education, not just go through the motions.

The phenomenon of ‘trial by media’ is also depicted with typical laser accuracy by Coetzee, as Lurie is confronted by a group of reporters who “circle around him like hunters who have cornered a strange beast and do not know how to finish it off”.

A teacher of the Romantic poets, Lurie offers a suitably romantic defence of his actions, and thus he must be cancelled. Though he is vain and pompous, all but the most ideologically warped reader will surely find themselves siding with Lurie in his contempt for his would-be judges and jurors.

That is certainly the case for this reader, and it has become more profoundly felt since the last time I read the book, having now been through a minor cancellation myself. Where previously I might have suspected the process would feel exactly as Coetzee describes, I now know that to be true. ‘Can confirm’, as they say.

However, these experiences in no way prepare me for the second part of the book, which ventures deep into the dark heart of South Africa’s tensions, taboos, and violent resentments.

Lurie leaves Cape Town (where, as it happens, I have also been since I last read the book) and goes to stay with his daughter, Lucy, in a town appropriately named Salem, no doubt an ironic reference to the witch trials held in the American historical city of the same name, with perhaps the further irony that the word actually means ‘peace’.

I will keep the spoilers to a minimum, suffice to say violence soon erupts, and the traumas of South Africa and the wider contemporary political scene play out in the reactions of the central characters. 

David waffles about historical guilt, but is surprised by his own “elemental rage” against those who have wronged his daughter. Lucy ostensibly appears infuriatingly naive—the archetype we now know as the ‘libtard’, who would rather be destroyed than compromise his or her (or ‘their’) cosy beliefs—yet she turns out to be stoical and brutally pragmatic.

“Do you hope you can expiate the crimes of the past by suffering in the present?” David asks her. Lucy replies: “No. You keep misreading me. Guilt and salvation are abstractions. I don’t act in terms of abstractions. Until you make an effort to see that, I can’t help you.”

Much like her father, Lucy refuses to play the victim, even though it would be completely justified: “If there is one right I have”, she says, “it is the right not to be put on trial”.

Indeed, one theme of the novel is the attempt by individuals to free themselves from history and politics, and the ultimate futility of such a task, especially in a country like South Africa. The characters scrabble around trying to find a corner of the world they can exist in unmolested by circumstance. But the world tends to have other ideas.

There are rich layers of symbolism and symmetry throughout Disgrace that I cannot elucidate without spoiling the story, except to say that with Coetzee the reader can always rest assured they are in the hands of a master. 

I should, though, say a word about Coetzee’s style. In Disgrace he perfects the third person, present tense technique previously employed in The Master of Petersburg, and used so effectively in subsequent works like Youth and Elizabeth Costello.

The novel begins:

For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well.

In this ostensibly simple line we find economical storytelling, elegance, and rich layers of meaning that will only become apparent later, namely the hubris of the central character, for whom sex will soon prove catastrophic.

Elsewhere, trying to extract information from an inscrutable interlocutor is described as “like punching a bag filled with sand”. Another man is “wearing the same overlarge suit: his neck vanishes into the jacket, from which he peers out like a sharp-beaked bird caught in a sack”. One could cite many more, similarly perfect descriptions throughout the novel. 

Nothing is wasted with Coetzee. Even the title’s single word proves impressively durable, providing the spine and recurring motif for the entire novel. The idea of ‘disgrace’ is applied variously to David, Lucy, and the unwanted dogs David helps to put down on his strange journey of penitence.

It is used perhaps most memorably when David finally confronts the father of the student with whom he had an affair:

In my own terms, I am being punished for what happened between myself and your daughter. I am sunk into a state of disgrace from which it will not be easy to lift myself. It is not a punishment I have refused. I do not murmur against it. On the contrary, I am living it out from day to day, trying to accept disgrace as my state of being.

Hopefully I have given you enough to want to read the book without giving everything away. Or reread it to find new gems. I have read it three times now, and each time has been more rewarding. Not a light piece in terms of theme, but made lighter by Coetzee’s exquisite craftsmanship.

A novel of rare perfection.

Call me Nick. Annoyingly I chose as my third novel in this series Melville’s Moby-Dick. I say annoyingly because it’s so massive I can’t possibly reread it all just for the purposes of this little post. I have read it though, and that is more than most people can say. And I’ve put it at number three, so there must be a good reason for that. Hence, let us begin part three of my ‘Top 10 Novels’.

3. Herman Melville - Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

One of the few ‘modules’ I took at university that wasn’t Leftist garbage was ‘Classic American Literature’. What struck me immediately was the sheer wildness and epic scale of this body of the work. The almost obscene vitality and youth of this beast called ‘America’, and the brave attempts of those who would seek to capture it in poetry and prose.

Though I was encountering this writing in a scholarly setting—via brick-like anthologies comprised of thousands of wafer-thin pages—this was clearly an experimental literature, forged in what still felt like an experimental nation, the main works being written and published less than 100 years after its founding.

The key writers—Melville, Hawthorne, Whitman, Poe, Emerson, Thoreau et al—were tough people, with rough hands and rough beards. Or that was how they struck me at least. A couple were clean-shaven and Poe had a moustache, but you get the point.

Of these giants, Melville seems to me to stand tallest, especially as we are focusing on fiction, thus leaving aside the great essayists Emerson and Thoreau. And of Melville’s works, Moby-Dick is of course the masterpiece.

His other writing is significant and surprisingly varied. Bartleby, the Scrivener seems to prefigure Kafka. Billy Budd is a Christian allegory considered by many to be his second greatest work. But only Moby-Dick is widely attributed ‘classic’ status.

Like so many great works, it was not appreciated at the time of publication. Years after Moby-Dick was released (the novel, not the whale) Melville had to take a job as a customs inspector, a fact that seems truly absurd for the creator of a work of fiction so engrained in the popular psyche it has become archetypal.

And, again like most classics, that work is a far weirder and more idiosyncratic affair than one would imagine for a tale that has achieved incarnation as a children’s cartoon. Indeed, D. H. Lawrence called it "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world” (and he wrote some pretty strange stuff himself).

There is an argument that it is not even strictly a novel. Harold Bloom said “Moby-Dick is not a novel, it’s a prose epic. It’s a giant prose poem. A Shakespearean prose poem in fact. Quite deliberately.”

Although it is exciting at times, this is not slick storytelling. Melville ignores narrative convention whenever he feels it necessary. “Call me Ishmael”, goes the book’s beguilingly simple opening line, yet only at times are we seeing things from Ishmael’s perspective. Other times the narrative takes on an omniscience clearly not available to one man, as well as a depth of knowledge that would surely be beyond him.

Hence the novel, or whatever we call it, is part adventure story, part philosophy, part poetry, part diary, part almost scientific document, as Melville obsessively details the dimensions of the whale’s head and so on.

The scope of the work renders it almost pointless to quote from it extensively in a short piece, so I will just include a single passage from one of the book’s most memorable chapters, ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’, wherein Melville (who appears to be writing as himself more than Ishmael at this point) tries to pinpoint what it is about the colouring of the whale that inspires such terror:

Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things—the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.

This elusive quality it is, which causes the thought of whiteness, when divorced from more kindly associations, and coupled with any object terrible in itself, to heighten that terror to the furthest bounds. Witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics; what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors they are? That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness, even more loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or shark.

Such extraordinary passages, which demonstrate the immense breadth of Melville’s reading, as well as the elevation of this ostensible novel to the status of prose poem, show us why Melville is thought by many to be America’s Shakespeare.

The fact that he began his literary career confined more strictly to the seafaring adventure genre before creating Moby-Dick (which somehow only took him 18 months) is even more astonishing. In reminds me somewhat of Brian Wilson, that other American giant and greatest musical genius of the 20th century, who transmitted his celestial harmonies through the unlikely medium of songs about surfing, cars, and girls.

No one could produce a work like Moby-Dick in the present day. In our culture of uniformity, mediocrity, lack of education, lack of toughness, lack of attention, it would simply be impossible.

There are no men like Melville anymore. And no books—or artistic productions of any kind—like Moby-Dick. We can barely approach a work so monumental. All we can do is float around it and try to cling on, like Ishmael clinging to the life-buoy.

But if you are looking for a philosophical meditation on life versus death, God versus nature, freedom versus bondage, and man versus whale, I certainly recommend you give it a try.

Welcome to part two of my ‘Top 10 Novels’ series.

In my twenties I used to set myself a target of reading 100 novels a year, and often succeeded. This is probably why I am not richer. But it does mean I have a read a ‘fuckton’ of novels.

Thus faced with the impossible task of deciding on a top ten, I simply chose them based on the order in which they occurred to me, my theory being that these are the books that have therefore made the most lasting impact on my psyche. 

That is how we ended up with the admittedly obscure Thomas Bernhard at number one. My next choice will be more familiar to readers, as I have gone for Michel Houellebecq, who I boldly claim is our greatest living novelist. 

Indeed, it is only the fact that J.M. Coetzee remains alive that prevents me from claiming Houellebecq is the last novelist.

He is the only person keeping the medium alive and relevant to contemporary life. All other novelists either get stuck in the dead end of postmodern experimentation, which can be enjoyable but is ultimately trivial (I say this having written a dissertation of something like 10,000 words on the subject). Or they go the other way, like Jonathan Franzen, and make a big deal about sticking to 19th century realism. Even with a writer as skilled as Franzen, it is hard to escape the fundamentally anachronistic nature of the project.

Alternatively, one can blend compelling storytelling with playful postmodern elements, like Paul Auster. Again the result is highly entertaining, but somewhat lightweight. Which is why, despite having read many of Auster’s novels and much of his nonfiction work, it didn’t even occur to me to include him on this list.

Houellebecq, on the other hand, is properly located in the tradition of philosophical fiction (as soon as I type that, I realise there is a massive bias towards this genre, if it can be called that, in my list). 

As is often the case with philosophical novelists, Houellebecq does employ realism as his primary form, but is never afraid to digress into broader musings on any subject, from sex, to microwave dinners, to the nature of Islam. He is also happy to let secondary characters go off on long soliloquies expounding on a chosen theme, without being too troubled if this stretches a section of dialogue beyond the realms of verisimilitude. 

It is not surprising, in a time of three-hour-long philosophical podcasts with relatively minor talents like Sam Harris, that this should remain the most vital style of fiction. In a Western world shaken and dangerously lacking in confidence, we return to first principles to work out who we are. And, more disturbingly, where we might be going. 

Thus Houellebecq’s 2015 novel, Submission, becomes an essential part of my list.

2. Michel Houellebecq - Submission

I have read most of Houellebecq’s novels. In fact, I’ve read almost everything he’s written, including his study of H.P. Lovecraft (even though I’ve never actually read Lovecraft) and his book of letters exchanged with Bernard-Henri Lévy, about which I remember nothing. Thus I could have chosen several other novels, particularly Whatever, which would be my second choice. 

But Submission naturally stands out due to its theme: an imagined France in 2022, where (spoiler alert I suppose) a Muslim party wins political power and quickly enacts a disturbing though oddly benign version of a strict Islamic society. 

In an all too plausible series of events, Islam takes over Houellebecq’s France with a whimper, as the elite and wider population capitulate with a mixture of apathy and opportunism. Hence, in part, the novel’s title.

Houellebecq’s critique of our political elites will be highly recognisable to anyone paying the slightest attention:

The idea that political history could play any part in my own life was still disconcerting, and slightly repellent. All the same, I realised—I’d known for years—that the widening gap, now a chasm, between the people and those who claimed to speak for them, the politicians and journalists, would necessarily lead to a situation that was chaotic, violent, and unpredictable. For a long time France, like all the other countries in Western Europe, had been drifting toward civil war. That much was obvious. 

Such analysis is blended with Houellebecq’s signature cocktail of bleak depictions of life’s petty sufferings suffused with dark humour, as our narrator, Francois—an academic with an expertise in French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans—repeatedly laments the quotidian cruelties of his seemingly meaningless existence.

Generally speaking, my body was the seat of various painful afflictions – headaches, rashes, toothaches, haemorrhoids – that followed one after another, without interruption, and almost never left me in peace – and I was only forty-four! What would it be like when I was fifty, sixty, older? I’d be no more than a jumble of organs in slow decomposition, my life an unending torment, grim, joyless and mean. When you got right down to it, my cock was the one organ that hadn’t presented itself to my consciousness through pain, only through pleasure. Modest but robust, it had always served me faithfully.

The personal and political come together in Francois’ increasingly suicidal musings (“Once again I found myself alone, with even less desire to live and nothing to look forward to but aggravations”) and his unlikely redemption through his last-minute embrace of Islam (or, at least, the lifestyle that his new Islamic patrons provide).

The genius of Houellebecq’s depiction of the Islamic takeover is to offer us the most agreeable possible version of such an occurrence. A utopia within an ostensibly dystopian premise.

The most unattractive academics are ‘given’ a wife, the younger ones several (“I’m getting another wife next month”, one announces). Salaries are increased, pensions become incredibly generous, as funding from the Middle East arrives. The new party’s leader, Mohammed Ben-Abbes, is not a violent despot, but a managerial version of Caesar, with ambitions to build a new kind of empire:

The first thing you notice is that he’s always going on about the Roman Empire. For him, European integration is just a means to this glorious end. The main thrust of his foreign policy will be to shift Europe’s centre of gravity toward the south… The first countries likely to join up will be Turkey and Morocco, then later will come Tunisia and Algeria…The logical outcome would be a president of Europe elected by the people of Europe.

Of course, there is a strong satirical element in all this, but the novel remains within the bounds of the plausible, thus qualifying as a realistic novel, rather than a strict satire. The benefits of the new Islamic system are turned up to eleven, while the obvious downsides one might typically fear are played down.

Yes, the women are all suddenly wearing trousers, but there are young wives on offer, and fat salaries to be had. True, things are less ideal for the Jews (such as Francois’ girlfriend, who flees for Israel) and there are pockets of violence in the initial struggle. Yet the narrator is merely saddened by the former, barely registers the latter, and we witness the country’s transformation from his jaded, self-involved perspective.

Still, it is not clear that we are to view the events as merely an expression of the protagonist’s cynicism. That would be too simplistic for a writer of Houellebecq’s genius. Thus he saves perhaps the most extraordinary passage for another character, Robert Rediger, an academic turned influential politician who has converted to Islam, and now proselytises with great enthusiasm on the subject.

His monologue, which forms the novel’s crescendo, spans the flaws of humanism, the teleological argument for God’s existence, and the erotic novel Story of O, finally concluding:

‘It’s submission,’ Rediger murmured. ‘The shocking and simple idea, which had never been so forcefully expressed, that the summit of human happiness resides in the most absolute submission.’

Only Houellebecq could so audaciously and satisfyingly combine the themes of individual nihilism, political capitulation, sexual abandon, and spiritual revelation. 

This is what makes him the last great novelist. He is the master of a dying form, and a ruthless observer of the dying West.

Are novels rubbish?

This was a terrible thought I had the other day. Having read hundreds of novels, particularly in my youth, I realised I could barely remember anything about them, and that most of them now seemed irrelevant. 

This may be due to the novel being a virtually dead form, or because we live in such a politicised world that all of the arts have become a sideshow. Or it may simply be that, having read these hundreds (thousands?) of novels largely in my 20s, I tended to favour ‘coming of age’ works (the Bildungsroman, to literary types) that now no longer interest me.

Or perhaps, as Pareto shows us, most of anything is rubbish, and one must always wade through the 90% of archetypal chaff to get to that precious wheat.

With that in mind I decided to list my top ten novels, without reference to the internet or even my own bookshelf, only choosing those which have left a lasting impression. I will now share this precious list with you, my wonderful readers, thus saving you much agricultural wading time.

I was going to do this as one article, but the first one has already taken up enough words (and time) for an entire piece, so I am going to release them one by one. 

There is no particular reason to embark upon this series, other than it is something I’ve been thinking about, and perhaps because, as I tried to express in my recent piece on Jonathan Bowden, art is something we need to embrace rather than eschew when it comes to winning the culture war. 

Remember, the other side believes we are blockheaded, shouty philistines. And frankly some of us are. But many of us are refugees from a time when artistic pursuits still mattered. When the barbarians weren’t at the gate and we could focus on higher things. 

But that is the wrong way to think about it because, as C.S. Lewis tells us in The Weight of Glory:

Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with ‘normal life’. Life has never been normal.

Therefore let me begin with the first choice in my ‘Top Ten Novels’ series.

Since this is based on those that left the most lasting impact, I will list them in the order in which they occurred to me.

1. Thomas Bernhard - The Loser

This was the immediate and clear winner for me. In case you haven’t heard of Bernhard (and most people haven’t) he was an Austrian writer, born in 1931, who developed an extraordinary literary style that is philosophical, bleakly hilarious, and extremely modern, arguably bordering on postmodern in a formal sense. 

On a personal level he was an odd mixture of cantankerous and ebullient, probably stemming from a naturally vital nature blighted by a horrendous lung illness, which was made worse by a disastrous stay in hospital, chronicled in his seminal five-volume memoir, Gathering Evidence. 

I have chosen The Loser (original title Der Untergeher) as Bernhard’s best novel, though they are almost all excellent. If you like this you will also enjoy (if that’s the right word) Concrete, The Lime Works, Old Masters, Wittgenstein's Nephew, Gargoyles, etc. In fact I recommend everything except Frost, where Bernhard was yet to find his distinctive voice (which seems to spontaneously erupt in part two of Gargoyles). 

The Loser is about a piano player who, confronted by the genius of the young Glenn Gould, immediately perceives his own mediocrity and decides to give up playing the piano for good. Their mutual friend, however, fails to accept his musical inadequacy and as a result is eventually driven to suicide. 

This is not a spoiler because it is announced from the first sentence, as Bernhard’s works do not exactly feature plots in any conventional sense. The entire story is told via the reminiscences of the narrator as he walks into an inn. Only at the very end does any forward action occur, as for nearly 200 pessimistic, dense, and darkly hilarious pages the narrator repeats variations on the phrase “I thought to myself as I entered the inn”. If you want to get all literary theory about it, you could say Bernhard is a master of pushing the limits of ‘Récit’ versus ‘Histoire’, but I’ll stop before any chicks reading this get too excited.

Bernhard’s depiction of Glenn Gould is of course fictitious, though it draws on much real biographical detail, such as Gould’s famous humming, audible on many of his recordings. But you don’t have to care about Glenn Gould or the piano to enjoy (or ‘enjoy’) the novel, as for Bernhard Gould becomes just a symbol of the ideal artist, single-mindedly, monstrously dedicated to his art:

Basically we want to be the piano, he said, not human beings but the piano, all our lives we want to be the piano and not a human being, flee from the human beings we are in order to completely become the piano, an effort which must fail, although we don't want to believe it, he said. The ideal piano player (he never said pianist!) is the one who wants to be the piano, and I say to myself every day when I wake up, I want to be the Steinway, not the person playing the Steinway, I want to be the Steinway itself. Sometimes we get close to this ideal, he said, very close, at which point we think we’ve already gone crazy, think we’re on the highroad to madness, which we fear like nothing else.

If you like Dostoevsky, Hamsun, or even Schopenhauer, I highly recommend this novel by a criminally underrated literary genius.