The Book Review

Francobile

In this way, The Possibility of an Island reprises Houellebecq’s message that Utopian thinking leads to hell on earth. His hatred of the sixties (and Islam) accounts for his embrace by some conservatives who overlook his pointed hostility to any received ideas, including theirs.

His champions across the political spectrum also misconstrue his literary talents. In every review, Houellebecq is joined at the hip with Céline, who took a wrecking ball to ossified “literary” French and opened it to vernacular, slang, the rhythms of proletarian speech—his arias of anarchistic humor bear no resemblance to Houellebecq’s clipped sarcasm. And Houellebecq, unlike Céline, has a knack for obliterating any moral queasiness associated with the ugly feelings he specializes in.

Still, there are two unforgettable features of The Possibility of an Island: its chronicle of the intricate betrayals, compromises, and willful delusion required to market a religion as a business—a marvelously sly-minded chunk of observation comparable to Gore Vidal’s deconstruction of God, Inc. in Messiah; and the book’s final 40 pages, in which Daniel25, having made contact with a disillusioned female clone and reached the end of Daniel1’s autobiography, abandons his sterile immortality, and on the thread of a hope that real human life could be better than its technologically stripped-down simulation, strikes off into the wilderness.

This jolting finale combines the mesmerizing realism of Daniel Defoe and the suspense of William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, as Daniel25 traverses the surreal landscapes of a drastically refigured planet, encountering the remnants of the old humanity (who kill his dog) and quixotically heading for a speck on a map that’s only a possibility, and perhaps not a place at all.

The Possibility of an Island
By Michel Houellebecq. Knopf. 352 pages