Michel Houellebecq hid a bomb in his new novel.
It does not affect women, nor religion, nor politics, although "Annihilation", as the book is called, is very much a political novel, a story that is largely set in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs during the presidential election campaign in 2027 Rather, the bomb at the end of the book, in the last sentence of the author's thanks, hits him himself: “I”, writes Michel Houellebecq, “have fortunately just come to a positive conclusion: for me it is time to stop.”
Julia Encke
Responsible editor for the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.
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Does he want to stop? Now? Why? You have just flown through the 620 new pages, at an enormous pace, because "Destroy" begins with an enigmatic geometric drawing with unknown characters as a spy thriller, the possible resolution of which, even when everything seems hopeless, pushes you further - there it should be over? Also ended with this language, which some accuse of being “without style” although “the absence of style, the non-style”, as the writer Rainald Goetz called it, is Houellebecq's actual style phenomenon? Apart from how extremely well this styleless language reads.
As always with Houellebecq, you don't know how seriously your self-presentation is meant.
This is his game.
However, by announcing his abdication, he manages to reinforce a feeling of sadness that has been with you the whole time during "annihilation".
Because the novel is actually about a farewell tour: the farewell to the world of politics, from work, from the family - only love remains.
An actual beheading?
But let's start at the beginning: It starts with encrypted anonymous messages appearing on the Internet, geometric figures on hacked commercial and government websites that, when clicked, can be used to start videos. These videos stand out because they create digital special effects that the best specialists in the field consider impossible; because the computing power they can muster exceeds everything known - and because they stage an attack by strangers on acquaintances: In the second video, Minister of Economic Affairs and Finance Bruno Juge stands in a garden with his hands tied behind his back.
One take further he is dressed in a long black robe with a hood over his head and is led to a guillotine which beheads him. His head then rolls down a grassy hill and stays right in front of the camera. Those who see it could swear they saw an actual beheading. It follows on a full page in the novel: the drawing of a guillotine with the technical terms of its individual parts.
At the same time, the living Bruno Juge is in his official apartment in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Finance, named after the Bercy district in Paris, where he has moved permanently since his wife cheated on him.
In his pajamas he meets his advisor and friend Paul Raison in one of the corridors, who - it is late at night - is about to leave the office, and invites him to have a drink with him in the official apartment.
Raison is the son of a former secret service agent.
For Houellebecq, it is this kinship that creates the link between thriller and political novel and allows him to switch from one genre to another - before the narrative drifts completely into the private sphere.