Agent provocateur
25. January 2008 05:43
Michel Houellebecq is the literary equivalent of a rock star - rebellious, adored and reviled - and a multi-millionaire. Andrew Hussey, who has known the controversial writer for more than a decade, joins his fans at a conference in Edinburgh to celebrate the publication of his new novel.
It is just before nine on a Friday morning in Edinburgh and a thin, faint rain is falling outside the Scottish Poetry Library in Crichton's Close, a short step from the tourist tat of the Royal Mile. This is where I meet French novelist and poet Michel Houellebecq, who is squatting on the building's concrete steps, hunched up in a large black anorak against the drizzle, sucking hard on the first of a long line of cigarettes.
With his pinched face and shambling gait, he is, to say the least, an incongruous figure; he looks more like a local wino than a world-famous man of letters. But Houellebecq, 47, is the nearest thing to a literary superstar France has produced in recent years. His books have been translated into 36 languages and recent film deals have made him a multi-millionaire. He is in Edinburgh to attend a conference which is being held in his honour by the University of St Andrews to coincide with the publication of his new novel, and which has attracted distinguished scholars and critics from all over the Western world.
He famously claims to be indifferent to the honours and attention he attracts. As we chat on the steps, a BBC film crew buzzes around us. Houellebecq waves them away with his fag smoke and we start to talk about dogs, in particular, his faithful pet, a Pembroke corgi called Clement, who has been left behind in the author's home near Dublin.
'This is one of the difficulties of fame and travelling,' says Houellebecq. 'It is always hard to abandon him.' Houellebecq reminds me that this is the same breed as the Queen's dogs ('I am more English than the English', he jokes lamely). Then, for a brief moment, he looks genuinely near to tears, raising his doe eyes heavenward. 'The love of a dog is a pure thing,' he says. 'He gives you a trust which is total. You must not betray it.'
This apparently banal statement takes on a larger significance when you start to read Houellebecq's latest book, The Possibility of an Island, in which Clement is disguised as the narrator's dog 'Fox' and plays a major role. More controversially, in his preface, Houellebecq also compares the relationship between men and women to that of an owner and a domestic pet. This role in society has been wiped away by the feminist movement.
'Women are not stupid,' he says, 'but they were not clever enough to realise that feminism did not bring freedom, but the opposite. That's why I'm glad feminism is dead.'
The falsity of feminism and, indeed, all other political liberal movements of the 1960s is a major theme in all of Houllebecq's novels. It is a mantra that he has repeated in one form or another in nearly every interview he has ever given. It does not explain, however, how this former computer programmer, psychiatric patient and part-time alcoholic has become a worldwide publishing phenomenon. This year, he was tipped finally to win the Prix Goncourt, the most prestigious of all French literary prizes (as it turned out, he didn't). Houellebecq feigns boredom when I ask him about this, shrugging and lighting another fag. It is, however, a moment loaded with great personal significance.
All of this was a very long way away when I first met Houellebecq nearly 10 years ago in Paris. He was living in a council flat on the unfashionable rue de la Convention, working in an office job which he hated. I went to see him to discuss the poems he had just started to publish.
It was the night of the semi-finals of Euro 96. England and France were both knocked out. In mourning for our teams and by now quite pissed, we struck up a kind of friendship. I had no idea that the book he had shown me earlier in the evening, which lay in tatty sheaves in the ugly side-room Houellebecq called an office, would became a hit in France and across the world.
'It will either make me famous or destroy me,' Houellebecq had said earlier, waving drunkenly at the clump of papers he called a novel. I thought it was a joke.
This novel was, in fact, his second and most ambitious work, called in English Atomised. It is the tale of Michel and Bruno, two half-brothers who grow up during the 1960s and 1970s, and who both come to feel suicidally cheated by the fake promises of liberation of the period. In despair, Bruno devotes himself to the search for the perfect blowjob, while Michel, a scientist working in eugenics, devotes himself, successfully, to the eradication of the human race.
The same bleak themes are continued in his next novel, Platform, a lurid account of the world of sex tourism in the Far East. The story culminates with an attack by Islamist terrorists on a sex resort, in which the adored lover of the narrator (also named Michel) is killed.
In real life, Houellebecq had already provoked anger and threats of vengeance from France's Muslim community in the days leading up to the publication of Platform by declaring drunkenly in an interview: 'Islam is the most stupid and murderous of all religions.' This was only days before the planes crashed into the Twin Towers on 11 September. Suddenly, in the wake of the terrorist attacks, Houellebecq became a seer and prophet whose theses about the decline of Western civilisation now seemed to carry deadly truths.
There were, however, more terrifying and human consequences. Under the pressure of death threats from Muslim extremists and others, Houellebecq's wife, Marie-Pierre, temporarily left him. Houellebecq, thoroughly shaken by events, had temporarily sought refuge with his long-standing friend and translator, Gavin Bowd, in the tiny Scottish village of Crail. I asked Houellebecq 10 years on if he could have ever imagined what lay ahead. 'No, that would have been impossible,' he said.
I reminded him of the statement he had made about his novels making him famous or destroying him. 'Well, it is a fact that I am famous. I do not think I have yet been destroyed.'
Did he deliberately cultivate notoriety? 'No,' he replied in the slow, sing-song French which is his trademark. 'I think that if I am notorious, it is because other people have decided that this is how I should be.'
This is not the opinion of the press in France, where he is often depicted as a calculating and manipulative operator who courts controversy to boost sales. This is also the argument of two recent biographies of Houellebecq which have appeared in France.
The most damaging of these is by investigative journalist Denis Demonpion. There are moments of high comedy in this book, such as when Demonpion gives an account of Houellebecq's encounter with the Raelian cult, the Swiss group which believes that God is an alien and which claimed to have cloned a baby in 2003 (and which provides the model for the Elohim cult which plays an important role in his latest novel).
Houellebecq was genuinely hurt by Demonpion's depiction of his difficult and traumatic relationship with his mother. This is possibly the source of Houellebecq's alleged misogyny, but it is also an area of his life that he refuses pointblank to talk about.
The academics gathered in Edinburgh are, in contrast, mostly unafraid of tackling such issues head-on. One paper discusses in learned terms, with reference to Freud and Lacan, 'the abject phallus of Houellebecq'. Another, presented by a leading academic from Cambridge, wittily examines Houellebecq's private life in the swingers' clubs of Paris and the Cap d'Agde. Yet another, from an Oxford sage, considers the twin demons of shopping and fucking in his work.
Throughout all of this, the object of study himself is gentle and generous with his time and comments, only occasionally cracking up at an absurd remark or the over-literal use of a phrase from his work (the bald statement: 'He got a hard-on like a rat', delivered in grave tones by a Dutch academic, provoked an uncontrollable fit of giggles from the great author). Houellebecq disappears for a few hours to 'go shopping in Marks and Spencer' with a beautiful blonde fan called Fanny from Montpellier, but is mostly attentive. (Fanny, who is 25, later describes to me the few hours in M&S as one of the great experiences of her life.)
Yet, for all these highbrow high jinks, there was one genuinely essential question asked at the conference: does Houellebecq mean what he writes? Houellebecq is characteristically evasive on the issue.
'I do not write autobiography,' he says, even though his novels, to anyone who knows anything about him, are barely refracted versions of his life. In this, Houellebecq resembles that most English of figures, Philip Larkin.
Most important, like Larkin, Houellebecq is a tender pervert whose poems on wanking and self-disgust also reveal an occluded gentleness and compassion for the human lot.
This is because although Houellebecq may claim to hate humanity, he is, in reality, a damaged and vulnerable human being who only wants to be loved. The truth of this is partially revealed at the conference dinner, when he rises to give a speech. With wine-stained lips, trembling a little, he begins with a ritual denunciation of the press and those who would stop him winning the Goncourt.
But then he pauses, his eyes mist over and, swaying slightly with drink, he talks directly and with real feeling to the acolytes gathered in the room. 'The press may hate me,' he says, 'and I know my battles with them are not over, but that doesn't matter. I want to say thanks to everyone here who reads me properly. It's all I've asked. It's also probably more than enough.'
With this, the greatest French writer of the 21st century crashes to his chair, lights a fag and, smiling slightly to himself, pours another drink.
Sunday November 6, 2005
The Observer