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I read Submission by Michel Houellebecq on the bus from Glasgow to Manchester last weekend. Started reading it going down, finished reading it 10 minutes before hitting Glasgow Buchanan Street Bus Station. First off, thanks to my friend Gerry for sending me Atomised, an earlier, great Houellebecq book. Galvanised me into getting Submission, which I had meant to get for a while, but just forgot. Atomised has, like all Houellebecq book, some interesting intellectual riffs.He's like JG Ballard in that, sometimes, he just lets the plot go and has his surrogate-him narrator just expound whatever crackpotty religious, scientific, societal or sexual theories he himself is clearly obsessed with at the time. Which is fine, but it doesn't make for good storytelling, the equivalent of a ten-minute soliloquy in the middle of a film.And Submission is no different at all. First off, I have to say, I LOVE the cover of this book. It's already one of my all-time favourite covers. No hyperbole there. It just hits the mark so perfectly; the Eiffel Tower with a beam cutting through the dark stormy clouds of historic-France destruction (Jesus, why did I start writing this? I could be watching a cute cat video or something, now I'm locked into it until the end! Dammit!) through the terrorist and cultural and societal aspects of Islam.It fits in with the general (facile, it has to be said) meteorological metaphors in the book about dark Islamic winds sweeping across the country (and, by extension, Europe), and you can look at it and draw your own conclusions. Gorgeous. The central conceit of this book is that France submits to Islam (hence the title) and it explores the changes that come about after this sudden irrevocable change. What was odd was the author's clear identification with ascetic 19th century Catholic writer JK Huysmans, literally trying on the man's life for size, trying to find a literary progenitor he could identify with completely...and failing miserably.I was quite excited when I heard about the premise initially, because I was curious to see what the enfant terrible (i.e. a prick that people tolerate because he occasionally comes up with something interesting) of French literature (I have read him right from his first book in around 1998) could come up with. Ultimately, though, the book is a major disappointment. For a start, it's only 256 pages, a novella, really, with the spread-out spacing on the page. I had envisioned some sort of satiric Islam-vs-Western-society epic, but what I got instead was a usual Houellebecq 'provocative' book where, as ever, he just tries to piss off the French literati and intellectuals. Who just kiss his arse now, to prove how much of a sense of humour they supposedly have, so it's pointless anyway. Which is fine insofar as it goes, but really, if you're trying to be taken seriously...it's not enough. At all.What the book basically is is the writer's usual alienated middle aged middle class doppelganger crying about the state of his life, and of modern France. Guy's an academic, so we get endless reams of conversation about modern France, Islam and fitting it with modern financial and economic philosophy, ad infinitum, ad tedium. Plus a wee spicy bit of leering over the idea of having a 15-year-old wife, and others, as befits the man's continuing obsession that way. It's more a sketch than a full book, very little real story, just his musings that you can tell are just designed to piss off his detractors.It's a shame, really, because when he tries to, that man can nail some unpalatable, incontrovertible truths about being human, let alone being French right now, and his musings on aging and the sex drive of a modern middle aged western man, and his philosophical zingers, can really make your head spin. But this book was just boring to me, mostly, a fake cry for polygamy and young wives and pissing over the French intelligentsia. I will not say any more, or detail anything that happens in it, in case anybody wants to read it, but really - I am literally yawning here. Better luck next crime, Michel, ya wee devo-pervo. Shrug.
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