Platform [Paperback]

Camus is a clear influence on Houellebecq. Paralleling the death of Meursault's mother in The Outsider, Platform begins with the death of Michel the narrator's father. Michel mirrors Meursault's emotional detachment from the loss. Like Meursault, Michel is a morally detached individual, refusing to conform to the expectations of Western civilization and society, pursuing instead his own path of libertinism. And just as in The Outsider, Michel is caught up in conflicting cultures.

Platform quite deliberately raises troubling authorial questions. Is Michel the narrator simply a mouthpiece for Michel the author's views? It is not an easy question to answer, but one which persists throughout the novel and impacts on the way in which it is read. For Michel the author has courted trouble in France for his disparaging views on Islam, Christianity and Judaism; and Michel the narrator holds various controversial and unsettling opinions, most notably on Islam and on the subject of sex tourism, on which neutrality on the reader's part is not an obvious option.

The novel cleverly juxtaposes the love story with the semi-pornographic descriptions of sex; it dwells on contrasting civilizations, the exotic East and the stale West, and the complications of the rival contrast between the secular hedonism of the West and the Islam of the East; and it explores, and manages to interrelate within what amounts to an analysis of globalization, the subjects of sex, tourism, the allure of an Eastern paradise, and Western consumer and business values.

Houellebecq, quite rightly, does not provide some neatly wrapped answer to all the questions his novel raises. Instead, it is left to the reader to contemplate the implications of the story, to work at making sense of the contradictions posed, to judge whether the apparent moral vacuum at the heart of the novel is filled. And it is this that makes Platform such a good book: by refusing to patronize its readers and express only what they want to read, it invites its readers to confront and provide their own answers to the provocative and difficult questions posed.

Through means of a story that revolves mainly around the far eastern sex trade, Houellebecq asks questions about the point of modern western civlisation, a civilisation which seems to have only hedonistic pleasure and 'individuality' remaining as values. I don't think Houellebecq is making a damning indictment of the sins of the flesh here ( you can't read some of his passages or anything about his private life to believe that) but rather expressing a somewhat gloomy Schopenhauerian kind of view that the human animal is just not meant to be happy and contented, that a fat and bloated west will not be able to begin a sustainable phase of contented pleasure seeking because nature just doesn't do happiness as an end in itself. Nature merely serves us short-term hedonistic tricks that might reward its own darwinian purposes, but not the ultimate contentment of the human being.

The author's many criticism's of Islam got him into even more hot water here than his justification of sexual tourism, but his interlocking of the two subjects now seems like some kind of bitter genius after 9/11 and Bali. Young muslim men blow themselves up in order to tear apart the limbs and bodies of infidel westerners enjoying the forbidden pleasures of nubile young asian women. Yet as Houellebecq dryly points out, the flesh pots of Thailand are pretty much the closest environment on earth to that of the 72 virgins which those young muslims think will be their reward for killing innocents. Why does man insist on believing in such self-denying esotoric virtues, when thier ultimate reward could be made possible by a simple economic transaction in the here and now? Pleasure will never be made simple, and happiness forever found unattainable in Houellebecq's grim and misanthropic vision of humanity.