|
Article Excerpt
It is to the credit of the French novelist, poet, and provocateur Michel Houellebecq that, in his new novel, "The Possibility of an Island" (translated from the French by Gavin Bowd; Knopf; $24.95), he so boldly, with considerable energy and erudition, seeks to confront and encompass the fundamentals of the human condition--or, to quote his veiled reference to Andre Malraux, "what a pompous author of the twentieth century had felt fit to call 'the human condition.' " It is to Houellebecq's discredit, or at least to his novel's disadvantage, that his thoroughgoing contempt for, and strident impatience with, humanity in its traditional occupations and sentiments prevents him from creating characters whose conflicts and aspirations the reader can care about. The usual Houellebecq hero, whose monopoly on self-expression sucks up most of the narrative's oxygen, presents himself in one of two guises: a desolate loner consumed by boredom and apathy, or a galvanized male porn star. In neither role does he ask for, nor does he receive, much sympathy.
Michel, the protagonist of Houellebecq's previous novel, "Platform"--the rather bleak and enigmatic English rendering of "Plateforme: Au Milieu du Monde," possibly an allusion to global politics, or a pun on "flat style," a characterization that most French critics find apt--helps promote, in conjunction with the ideally compliant and lewd travel agent Valerie, a momentarily booming chain of Asian vacation resorts for European sex tourists. In the new novel, a lengthy exercise in futuristic science fiction, the hero, named Daniel, involves himself in the founding stages of a worldwide cult, Elohimism, that delivers its adherents into practical immortality, achieved through replacement of the deceased individual by a DNA-derived duplicate possessed of not only the same bodily traits but the same memories. The original Daniel--Daniel1--lives more or less in the present era, in Paris and Andalusia, and his latest edition, Daniel25, lives two millennia hence, in a depopulated Spain. They and the intervening Daniels have become, thanks to the ingenious founders of Elohimism, what the novel calls neohumans, who reside in electrically fenced isolation, keeping in rather slack electronic touch with one another and waiting, with an indifference compounded of Buddhist detachment and genetic modification, to die and be replaced by eighteen-year-old clones. The earth in these millennia has been beset by several disasters: first, a melting of the polar ice that reduced the planet's population from fourteen billion to seven hundred million, and then the Great Drying Up, which reduced it further, to pathetic bands of savages who roam the blasted terrain outside the fenced pens of the neohumans, and who are killed if they come too close, as beseeching mothers with starving babies sometimes do. Daniel24 annihilates them with "the sensation of accomplishing a necessary and legitimate act."
Sound inviting? Want to go there? Curiously, of the novel's strictly alternating strands, the relatively laconic and sexually neutered commentary of the neohumans Daniel24...
|
