W. B. Yeats – Man And Poet By A Norman Jeffares

W. B. Yeats – Man And Poet

By A Norman Jeffares

(Gill and Macmillian)

This reissued critical biography was first published in 1949, and remains one of the key texts about Yeats. Jeffares mixes biography and criticism, showing the interrelationship between the life and the work, and how one who said that we must choose either perfection of one or the other, achieved a high degree of accomplishment in both. 

Yeats was lucky in having an indulgent father and a supportive family. He was no genius at school, and as anyone who has read his prose will know, he remained a bit woolly headed all his life. ‘You would like to be a philosopher when you are really a poet,’ his father told him. We learn of the meetings with, and influence of, George Russell, John O’Leary, Katharine Tynan and, of course, Maud Gonne. In later life, when he told her, ‘I am not happy without you.’, she replied, ‘Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and you are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.’ We see how he endured poverty until well on in life, but stuck to his guns. He also stood by John Synge, when the mob was baying for his blood, and we get the details of the founding of The Abbey in 1904.  

Jeffares is good on the different stages in Yeats’ development as a poet. He is right when he writes: ‘The verses in The Wind Among The Reeds have great beauty, but lack the honesty, even the bitter and brutal honesty, of much of his late work. That is why the newcomer to Yeats’ poetry finds that the unreality of the earlier symbolism is less striking than the expression of the full man in the later work.’ Jeffares is quite specific about the nature of the change: ‘He had cut away the props which supported his early work: he no longer relied on the elaborate mythology which he had created for himself out of the romantic poets, the Celtic legends, folklore and a smattering of symbolism. His verse had changed and he had begun to write the poetry which was to make him leader of a new generation of poets, unique in the history of English literature as a poet who was able to change his style so completely, to write with increasing energy as he grew older.’

My own view on Yeats is that he took a long time to grow up and get good, (he hadn’t done anything like his best work when he won the Nobel Prize), and that on a personal level he was probably the kind of person who was a royal pain in the ass to know (I mean, you can hardly imagine going for a pint with him in The Flowing Tide when the was director of The Abbey). Even his wife George said, ‘He simply did not understand people.’ But he did remain in Ireland at a time when anyone with an ounce of creative talent was getting out as fast as they could, and any artist working in Ireland today owes something of the freedom they now enjoy to Yeats. In that measure, he is heroic.

This is a handsome edition, which will compliment Denis Donoghue’s Modern Masters study, and will provide a service until, and probably after, Roy Foster’s biography appears.         

             

Never Let Me Go By Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go                                                                                  

By Kazuo Ishiguro

(Faber & Faber)

Reviewing this book presents the commentator with the perennial problem, more usually encountered by film critics, of how to elucidate the material without giving away the all important twist upon which it all hangs, the revelation of which retrospectively casts the whole story in an entirely different light. Alas, due to the excellent publicity job done by the publishers, the world and his wife knows by now that the new novel by former Booker Prize winner Ishiguro (for 1989’s The Remains of the Day) is ‘about clones’, a fact only verified for the unforewarned reader when he reaches p127 of the text. Some reviewers have even been foolhardy enough to describe the work as Ishiguro’s first foray into science fiction. This is doubly unfortunate, since to focus exclusively on the biotechnological element of this genre-defying and -defining story represents a seriously reductive reading of what is, like most of the best science fiction, a subtly allegorical tale. For this is not so much a novel about clones, as one about that far more extreme state of existence, which we cringe with embarrassment in calling ‘the human condition’. This is the reason, rather than the fact that most of you will already have heard anyway by now, that this writer has little compunction about the potential party-pooping involved in giving the game away. Besides, Ishiguro is a determinedly undramatic writer, his fictions usually proceeding by subtle shifts in tone rather than grand gestures. By the time our suspicions are confirmed, it is no more than we have guessed.

Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham, an idyllic private school somewhere in the English countryside. The children were sheltered entirely from the outside world and brought up to believe that they were special. While it strikes us as strange that they have only initial letters for surnames, and that no mention is made of their families, they are not aware of anything out of the ordinary in their circumstances, as how could they know any different?

At Hailsham they were educated by guardians: the Principal Miss Emily, the gentle Miss Geraldine, and the sporty Miss Lucy, the latter of whom grows uneasy with the way her charges are being treated, given what’s in store for them, and unceremoniously spills the beans. They are also visited by Madame, who takes their more accomplished art and poetry away with her, for her gallery. But they are vaguely yet unmistakeably aware that those responsible for their welfare are palpably repulsed by them. With the otherworldly atmosphere a splendidly idiosyncratic but worryingly euphemistic vocabulary emerges, and we learn that these young people will in early adulthood become ‘carers’ in recovery centres, and then ‘donors’ themselves, and even go searching for their ‘possibles’, before they eventually ‘complete’.  

Now thirty-one, Kathy looks back on the past and narrates the haunting story of how she and her two best friends slowly come to deal with the truth about their seemingly happy childhoods, the place where it happened, and what the future holds for them. Kathy and Tommy are flabbergasted to learn later, when they finally confront their former guardians, that there could possibly have been a serious debate in the wider world about whether or not they had souls. But they, it transpires, were the lucky ones, having received an enlightened education. The majority of their kind, bred only for the use their internal organs would be put to, was not deemed worthy of such special care, and their upbringing was rather more rough and rudimentary. Yet, if their end is to be exactly the same as the others, it begs the question, which they rightly ask, “Why Hailsham at all?” The place was a sham, but they have to hail it.     

When I claimed above that it did not matter if this review revealed the plot, invoking our old friend the ‘human condition’ as my excuse, it was precisely because Ishiguro is asking a more universal question here about the nature of mortality, for all of us: if we are all going to die, sooner or later, what’s the point of any human striving and achievement? “Why anything at all?” We distract ourselves with religion, thinking holy people inhabit another plain, and will be saved; or with art, imagining artists live more fully than other people and that art is redemptive; or with the search for love, hoping that finding someone else to share it all with will confer meaning on our lives and make us happy. Yet our fate remains unchanged: we are still going to die. However special we are, or imagine ourselves to be, no one is spared. Paradoxically, the clones have it both better and worse than the rest of us: they at least die giving life, but they help prolong the lives of uncaring and ungrateful humans. It is perhaps significant here that while most humans can reproduce, these clones cannot have children.

This book is so much more than a meditation on the ethical problems thrown up by genetic research. If the characters seem emotionally stilted, just try imaging what it would be like to grow up in an institution, without parents, or even the knowledge that people have parents, and with no expectations of having a family to raise or a career to develop. By the same token, Kathy and Ruth and Tommy are no more or less repressed than Stevens, the butler in The Remains of the Day. What is ultimately seen as important is the act of remembrance, for as Kathy writes towards the end, ‘I was talking to one of my donors a few days ago who was complaining about how memories, even your precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t see them ever fading. I lost Ruth, then I lost Tommy, but I won’t lose my memories of them.’ What history is to a nation, memory is to the individual. Which is why the amnesiac pianist hero of Ishiguro’s wonderful previous novel, The Unconsoled, is condemned to living in a nightmare world where something always prevents him getting things done, and he can never finish anything.

In cool, pellucid prose, while deftly withholding and gradually revealing salient information, Ishiguro has fashioned yet another indelibly strange but oddly moving work of art, which is, in the end, a love story, as flat yet hypnotic as the Norfolk landscape it references.   

First published in The Sunday Independent

Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich By David Irving

Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich

By David Irving

(Focal Point Publications, £25)

Height only 5ft 4ins, an emaciated figure with a head too large for his body, and a clubfoot for which he was taunted as both boy and man, the cards seemed stacked against Joseph Goebbels from the start. Or so David Irving would have us believe, in his attempt to explain the psychology of a mass murderer, and justify genocide. Unlike some American white supremacists, Irving does not dispute the historical veracity of the Holocaust, but he does place its origins in the socio-economic context of Weimar Germany, with its crippling unemployment and rampant inflation.  

While I would readily accept that World War Two was essentially a continuation of World War One, it seems to me that the Treaty of Versailles and the War Reparations Commission had more to do with Germany’s problems than the Jewish people. Besides, neither anti-Semitism nor belief in the invincibility of the German people were new ideas in Germany; but they did assume greater importance as the country faced, or rather failed to face, its post-war problems. There was anti-Semitic feeling in 1918, partly because of the large number of Jews among Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartacists and the Independent Socialists. So racialist theory was founded on people’s political inclinations. And the effects of the Wall Street crash and the trail of bankruptcies and unemployment that it left behind in the United States were felt severely by all countries engaged in international trade, not only Germany.  

Irving explores none of this. The chief selling point of the book is Irving’s exclusive access to the previously undiscovered Goebbels’ diaries, found in Moscow in 1992. Quotation from the diaries takes place inside inverted commas, and commentary outside them, but the distinction begins to blur, since although Irving at one point refers to the ‘heathen criminality’ of the death camps, nowhere does he condemn, but rather seems to condone, his subject’s anti-Semitism, homophobia and misogyny. Irving also flits back and forth with gay abandon between the past and present tense, when talking about the past, which is a very sensationalised way to write history.

Like many of the leaders of our own 1916 Rising, Goebbels began with artistic ambitions, writing poetry, plays and novels, and only later became a political animal. He studied Latin, philology and history, and gained a PhD. He blamed Jewish control of publishing houses for his lack of literary success. Despite his distinctly non-Aryan physique (there is surely a study to be written on the negative image of disability in history: Goebbels identified with Richard III), he became an even more enthusiastic Jew-baiter than his Fuhrer. Irving shows how if one accepts the crazy logic of putting eugenic theory into action, the Final Solution seems almost rational:

                       Physically liquidating them now seemed an increasingly viable

                       solution. If it was possible to liquidate the insane, if Goring’s

                       air force was killing the relatively innocent English by the              

                       thousand, why should the ‘guilt-laden’ Jews be spared?  

                       Goebbels had discussed the euthanasia project (‘the covert

                       liquidation of the mentally ill,’ he called it) with Bouhler on

                       January 30, 1941. Bouhler had informed him that they had

                       quietly disposed of 80,000 so far, with 60,000 more still to

                       go. ‘Hard work, but necessary too,’ applauded Goebbels.

A virgin until 33, he rapidly made up for lost time, with a succession of actresses and secretaries. This inevitably led to marital conflict, although his wife Magda was also culpable as regards infidelity. A newspaper editor and journalist who hated journalists, had he lived today he would have made a brilliant creative director in an advertising agency, such was his understanding of how to sway public opinion. (Indeed, Irving too may well have missed his true vocation, and is an ad-man manqué, since there can be few more difficult briefs than trying to retrospectively make Nazism seem acceptable.) As Minister for Propaganda, he set up the Chamber of Culture, and had complete control over the press, literature, theatre, music, the graphic arts, film and radio. His censorship was meticulous and ruthless. Signs appeared in dance-halls reading ‘Jazz Dancing Forbidden’. He organised an exhibition of ‘Junk Art’, including the work of Otto Dix, Emile Nolde and Oskar Kokoschka, to demonstrate to the public the ‘artistic bolshevism’ of this work. His loyalty to Hitler was unswerving, and when the end came in May 1945, he took his wife and six children with him to the Nazi Valhalla with equanimity, the day after his leader killed himself.

Irving presents the evidence, but fails to synthesise it into a larger whole. The book ends with Goebbels’ suicide, and no attempt is made to appraise his career. Irving is good at the everyday details, like when he describes the internal feuding among the leaders of the Third Reich, but he misses the overall picture.  

Anyone who has read the work of Paul Celan or Primo Levi will know the other side of the story, the struggle of the victims to cope with the burden of grief and memory. A favourite phrase of Levi’s was, ‘the nature of the offence’. Discussing that phrase in Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis wrote:

                      The offence was unique, not in its cruelty, nor in its cowardice, 

                      but in its style - in its combination of the atavistic and the 

                      modern. It was, at once, reptilian and ‘logistical’. And

                      although the offence was not definingly German, its style was.

Of course, the worm turns inexorably, and the abused become the abusers, the oppressed become the oppressors, and today we need writers like Edward Said to remind us of the humanity of Palestinians. But the fact remains that the Holocaust was so horrific that any considered, measured or reasoned response seems offensive. Goebbels was an evil man, who was a linchpin of a regime which presided over the nadir of this best and worst of centuries.       

First published in the Irish Independent

 

Submission By Michel Houellebecq

Submission

By Michel Houellebecq

(Heinemann, £18.99 stg)

Published in French on January 7th this year, the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, and now appearing in English translation, you couldn’t say controversialist Michel Houellebecq latest novel, his seventh, is not prescient. He has form when it comes to Muslim immigration in France, and jihadism, of course. He was taken to court in 2002 for incitement to racial hatred, after calling Islam ‘the stupidest religion’, and his 1999 novel Platform culminates in the conflagration of a fundamentalist terrorist atrocity on a beach resort in Thailand.

Submission’s central character is a recognisable Houellebecq type. François, 44, a lecturer at the Sorbonne, is reclusive, friendless, existing on a diet of frozen dinners in his two room apartment, and trying to avoid mithering by postgraduate students he doesn’t consider up to snuff. He usually initiates an annual affair with a female student, which ends in the summer when he receives a message beginning ‘I’ve met someone.’ The current incumbent is 22-year-old Myriam, beautiful, sexy and Jewish, who clearly cares for him, but he can’t respond. He was the author, in his 20s, of a brilliant dissertation on decadent 19th century novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, author of the infamous Au Rebours. 

Set slightly in the future, Submission partakes of a trait of most of the best science fiction, that of a ‘What if…?’ projection on the present. It is also in the tradition of the dystopian narrative, á la Orwell’s 1984, although the timeline here is rather more truncated and immediate, for this is a dystopia we mostly already inhabit.

It is 2022, and the apolitical François is settling in to watch the Presidential election results on TV, entertainment he considers second only to the soccer World Cup. After the preliminary voting, two candidates emerge: Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National, and the head of France’s new Islamic party, Mohammed Ben Abbes. The Socialists coalesce with the Muslim Brotherhood to defeat Le Pen, and Ben Abbes becomes president. Because the Brotherhood cares more about education than the economy, as the chief instiller of appropriate moral values in the next generation, all they ask is that state secondary schools and universities adopt an Islamic curriculum. François is duly informed that he cannot return to his university work unless he converts to Islam, and is retired on a generous pension.

These events precipitate a crisis of (non) faith, which sees François taking off for the Benedictine abbey in southern France where Huysmans spent his last years after abandoning his dissolute life in Paris and converting to mystical Catholicism in middle age, and thence to the medieval Christian pilgrimage site Rocamadour. Myriam leaves for Israel with her parents, but François concludes, “There is no Israel for me.”

This is no coup d’etat, so little seems to change at first, but over the following months François starts to notice small things, beginning with how women dress. He sees fewer skirts and dresses, more baggy pants and shirts that hide the body’s contours. Non-Muslim women have adopted the style to escape the sexual marketplace that Houellebecq has delineated so well elsewhere. Youth crime declines, as does unemployment when women, grateful for the social engineering of new family subsidies, begin to leave the workforce to care for their children.

François thinks he sees a new social model developing before his eyes, which he imagines has the polygamous family at its center. Men have different wives for sex, childbearing, and affection; the wives pass through all these stages as they age, but never have to worry about being abandoned. They are always surrounded by their children, who have lots of siblings and feel loved by their parents, who never divorce. François is impressed, but while his admiration may initially stem from a colonial fantasy of the erotic harem, it flourishes as acknowledgement of a secure social order, based on the family.

The big question here is, how much does Houellebecq himself endorse this view? Curiously, he may not simply be pulling our leg here. When François accedes to the gentle proslytising of suave university president, Robert Rediger, and returns to his now exorbitantly paid teaching post, it seems not solely out of self-interest, if at all. Similarly, when he also edits a complete works of Huysmans, where he concludes that his hero was not really a decadent after all, he genuinely seems to believe this. But if François rolls over, does that mean Michel H has?

When asked about ‘the stupidest religion’ remark last January, Houellebecq declared that he had now changed his mind, through reading the Qu’ran. “Perhaps I hadn’t read it with enough care,” he said. “Now I think that a reasonably honest interpretation of the Qu’ran does not end up with jihadism. It would require a very dishonest interpretation to arrive at jihadism.” He also added that Submission is “not Islamophobic. Even an inattentive reading would not see it as that.”

So, while some in France have complained that the novel fans right-wing fears of the Muslim population, that is to miss Houellebecq’s deeply subversive point: Islamists and anti-immigration demagogues really ought to be on the same side, because they share a suspicion of pluralist liberalism and a desire to return to ‘traditional’ or pre-feminist values, where a woman submits to her husband, just as ‘Islam’ means that a Muslim submits to God. Rediger even permits himself a sly allusion to Pauline Réage’s BDSM classic The Story of O in this regard.

 Which is all fine and well, unless you’re the kind of man who’d like to be with a woman who has a brain, or are the kind of woman for whom domesticity does not provide total fulfilment. 

 The other aspect of this timely novel to be remarked upon is how much Houellebecq has improved as a writer qua writing since his early scattergun sprawls. When he started off, he had a lot to say, but was not always all that careful about how he said it. However, aphoristic sentences such as ‘For man, love is nothing more than gratitude for the gift of pleasure’, and ‘Living together would have spelled the end of all sexual desire between us, and we were still too young to survive that as a couple’ partake of a Wildean exactitude. How much of this greater attention to language is the result of working with more skilled editors and translators we may never know, but it is one more reason to read this novel, from a writer who has never been afraid to grapple with the big questions.

Breakdown by Cathy Sweeney

So I read Breakdown (2024) by Cathy Sweeney. Well written, easy to read. My main takeaway is: 

Why do women think they have a monopoly on middle-class, middle-aged discontent and angst under the vacuousness of late capitalism, mindless consumerism and domestic tedium? I’ve some news for you: lotsa men feel the same way. Lots of people are unfulfilled, both men and women. Why is it always men’s fault? * Ah yes, the patriarchy. As if men didn’t suffer under that too. It’s hardly the boring husband’s fault that she’s a failed artist. Also: why do people like this nameless character have children in the first place? Did they think that they wouldn’t grow to dislike them so much, over time? 

I would say that there is a very strange mother/daughter dynamic going on between Cathy Sweeney and Lucy Sweeney Byrne (who, incidentally, I would consider to be a far superior writer), particularly in the wake of this novel’s publication. Both share a disaffected worldview. Maybe I just find the disillusionment of younger women more interesting than that of the older cohort. 

* This strawman argument against these strawmen is, of course, a commonly observable phenomenon among contemporary Irish women whom I’ve read, e.g. Eimear McBride, Niamh Campbell, Nicole Flattery. While it may be therapeutic to get things off your chest, I’m not sure how much it helps the discourse. 

The Map and the Territory By Michel Houellebecq

The Map and the Territory 

By Michel Houellebecq

(Vintage, £7.99 stg, P/B)

The latest novel from the author of controversial and prize-winning works Atomised and Platform is his most normal and conventional outing thus far. But this is Houellebecq, so it is still relatively challenging. 

Essentially it is the life-story of successful French artist Jed Martin, an only child and a solitary adult, whose social and sexual interactions are few and far between. He meets his retired architect father once a year for Christmas dinner (his mother committed suicide when he was a boy). For a time he has an affair with beautiful Russian émigré, Olga. Otherwise his main distraction is the fluctuating state of the boiler in his bachelor pad/artist’s studio. He seems to stumble through life, having the great good fortune that his talent is recognised, and handsomely remunerated, without much obvious self-promotion. Indeed, his Kiplingesque indifference to ‘those two imposters’, and the feeling that his acclaim is as much the result of blind chance as it is of ability and application, is one of his more attractive features.

He begins his artistic career photographing tools and household objects, but gains attention for his series of photographic recastings of Michelin maps. It is through these works that he meets Olga, who is Public Relations director of Michelin France. After they become lovers, they enjoy weekends away in provincial France, at ‘Charm & Relax’ hotels and Michelin starred restaurants. One could argue that in his caustic observations on the socio-economic demographics of the domestic leisure industry, Houellebecq here does for tourism in France what Platform did for holidays in Thailand. Jed’s mature work, carried out long after Olga has returned to promotion in Moscow, starts out as the Series of Simple Professions, and culminates in canvases with titles like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology and Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market. He photographs things; he paints people.

The Michelin fixation has a clear antecedent in Roland Barthes’ essay ‘The Blue Guide’ from Mythologies; but it is another, more well-known Barthes work which really informs The Map and the Territory: ‘The Death of the Author’. Jed requests that none other than Michel Houellebecq, the notorious novelist, write the catalogue essay for a retrospective of his work. After meeting the author, he decides to do a portrait of Michel Houellebecq, Writer. So, Houellebecq becomes a character in his own novel, with all the opportunities for satire, self-parody and doubleness that entails. When the author gets bumped off in gruesome fashion, the book takes an unexpected left turn into a police procedural. It also brings the nod to Barthes full circle, and sets up a challenge from the creative to the critical, the literary to the theoretical. Barthes argued for the effacement of authorial biography and intention. Houellebecq’s voice, entangled as it is with his anti-celebrity, and the flatly opinionated tone of his writings, is so powerful that it speaks from beyond the grave.

Some will say that this is Houellebecq’s least ambitious novel, even if it is the first one to win the prestigious Prix Goncourt in France. Atomised, after all, was dedicated ‘to mankind’. But, aside from taking a few pot-shots at his detractors among France’s media figures, for the most part Houellebecq avoids the navel-gazing pitfalls inherent in the ‘novelist-as-character-in-his-own-novel’ ploy. Rather like the artist Jed Martin, the writer Michel Houellebecq has achieved both critical and commercial recognition, a combination which can arouse a good deal of professional jealousy and financial envy. The novel does contain some shrewd send-ups of art criticism and the art market. The character Houellebecq, in his exhibition catalogue, opines that all of Jed Martin’s work could be subtitled A Brief History of Capitalism. Perhaps the same is true of Houellebecq’s oeuvre. At any rate, he can still employ his trenchant talent for amusingly sweeping generalisation to devastating effect, as with, ‘They had several happy weeks. It was not, it couldn’t be, the exacerbated, feverish happiness of young people, and it was no longer a question for them in the course of a weekend to get plastered or totally shit-faced; it was already – but they were still young enough to laugh about it – the preparation for that epicurean, peaceful, refined but unsnobbish happiness that Western society offered the representatives of its middle-to-upper classes in middle age.’ One certainly wonders how far his tongue was planted in his cheek when he has Jed’s father offer this opinion of his work: ‘He’s a good author, it seems to me. He’s pleasant to read, and he has quite an accurate view of society.’

First published in The Sunday Independent.

The Possibility of an Island By Michel Houellebecq

The Possibility of an Island

By Michel Houellebecq

(Hamish Hamilton, £12.99stg/€19.04)

In many ways, this new novel by the bad boy (or hot property, depending on your point of view) of contemporary French letters, could be described as a sequel to his breakthrough, second novel, 1999’s Atomised. Less generously, it could equally be dismissed as ‘more of the same’.

All the previous and expected particular elements are in place: the jaundiced disdain for the rampant yet alarmingly unselfconscious self-indulgence of hippie-liberal hangover values (or, rather, lack of them); the acerbic appraisal of the selfishly hedonistic West, fixated as it is on the glorification of youth, the accumulation of wealth and the instant gratification of pleasure – in short what is generally rather euphemistically described as ‘progress’, the dark corollary of which is its incapacity to accommodate its own old, sick or poor – much less those of what is usually somewhat optimistically referred to as the ‘developing’ world; an equal contempt for the power-hungry absurdities of traditional, atavistic, family-values orientated religion, be it Jewish, Christian or Muslim; and a quasi-science fictional fascination with the possibilities opened up by biochemistry and genetics for curing man, the sick animal, of his desires, violence and neuroses, sometime in the distant future.

Daniel is a successful forty-something French comedian, who has built his reputation on envelope-pushing, near-the-knuckle shock tactics, in his stand-up routines and films. Having amassed a fortune but, in the process, grown blasé about what he does, he goes to live in a depopulated part of southern Spain, in semi-retirement.

There have been two significant women in his life. The first is his contemporary Isabelle, a magazine editor whom he marries and takes to Spain, and with whom all goes well until her aging body initially puts her off herself, and then puts him off her. They divorce, and she goes to live in Biarritz, with the morphine-shooting old biddies.  The second is younger model Esther, the twenty-two-year old Spanish student of philosophy and piano, who supplements her income with acting and, well yes, modelling. But their intensely erotic affair, described in copious detail, is doomed, since, ‘For Esther, as for all the young girls of her generation, sexuality was just a pleasant pastime, driven by seduction and eroticism, which implied no particular sentimental commitment.’ Through her Daniel realises that he too, at forty-seven, is careworn and past it. Isabelle wanted love but not sex; Esther wanted sex but not love: therein lies his conundrum.

While in mainland Spain, and subsequently in Lanzarote, Daniel becomes involved with The Elohimites, a cult espousing free love and eternal life through DNA cloning. When the cult leader, The Prophet, is murdered by a jealously disgruntled acolyte, and Daniel’s artist friend Vincent takes over the reins, Daniel donates his own DNA sample for posterity. Thus, in a kind of Biblical pastiche, the narrative is shared between him, Daniel1, and Daniel24 and Daniel25, his distant descendants, who have been culled from his DNA, with all the annoyingly rancorous human traits ironed out of the mix. When one incarnation dies, he is replaced by the next number in line. So, we are transported to 2000 years in the future, where Daniel25, like the rest of these ‘neohumans’, passes his days in neutral tranquillity, adding his commentary to his ancestor’s personal history, striving to understand what could have made him so unhappy, while the remnants of the old human race roam in primitive packs outside his secure compound.   

In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound asked a pertinent question: ‘Can you be interested in the work of a man who is blind to 80 percent of the spectrum? To 30 per cent of the spectrum? Here the answer is, curiously enough, yes IF…if his perceptions are hypernormal in any part of the spectrum he can be of very great use as a writer – though perhaps not of very great ‘weight’. This is where the so-called crack-brained genius comes in. The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully fostered by the inferiority complex of the public.’ Houellebecq’s range may be limited, but his gaze is intense, the jettisoning of a balanced and well-rounded worldview being the price for the unflinching and penetrating stare which produces insight. However, he is far from being a prophet, or even the prescient social and cultural forecaster he has been hailed as. For he is merely describing things as they already are, as he sees them (and his objective reality is certainly as verifiable and valid as those who cheerfully persist in ‘looking on the bright side’), but as most people are still too blithely unaware or too wilfully unwilling to see for themselves.

While never a very elegant stylist (at least in translation), his true metier is that venerable, almost forgotten genre, ‘the novel of ideas’. As for the repetition and lack of progression in his oeuvre, that is something which can only trouble his longtime admirers rather than those new to his work. But even the old fans may well find themselves making allowances. For, while he may only have a couple of things to say, hardly anyone else is saying them, and he says them very well. Whether or not he needs to keep on restating them is another matter, and the choice to continue listening is ultimately yours. His choice is whether or not he needs to change his tune, or at least to conduct some variations on it. But for the time being, he has decided to leave well enough alone.

First published in The Sunday Independent