Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq review – deepfakes, sex acts and cyber-attacks

In his sometimes enjoyable longest novel yet, the author’s obsession with sex and desire competes for attention with his usual grandstanding and an intricate, Dan Brown-like pulp mystery

Until fairly recently, anyone asked to name France’s most prominent living author might well have said Michel Houellebecq, who shot to prominence in the 1990s and 00s with his novels Whatever, Atomised and Platform, pungent satires that ruthlessly insisted on sex as just another commodity in a marketplace of winners and losers. (A more likely name on readers’ lips now would probably be 2022 Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux, who also writes of sex, and who was publishing long before Houellebecq but was somewhat damningly more or less invisible in the anglosphere until the past decade.)

Houellebecq’s later novels come in all stripes – sci-fi in The Possibility of an Island, or the art-world caper of The Map and the Territory, in which Houellebecq gets murdered – but it’s the incel-adjacent vibe of his best-known work that has decisively shaped his reputation. But only with his dismal 2019 novel, Serotonin, about a civil servant stalking his ex-girlfriend as the gilets jaunes protests come to the boil, did time seem to be up for Houellebecq, whose work seemed almost crushed by the weight of its own instinct for provocation. His most recent book was a short, score-settling memoir, Quelques mois dans ma vie (A Few Months in My Life), responding to a controversy over Islamophobic remarks in which he predicted a “reverse Bataclan”. The title also told of how he was tricked – with little difficulty – into taking the lead role in a Dutch porn film that he later sought to suppress.

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