My Top 10 Novels - Part 2
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.