Michel Houellebecq: Lanzarote

Reviewed by YVONNE VAN DONGEN

At 87 pages, this offering from Houellebecq is an expensive indulgence and terrible value for money. Lanzarote could be regarded as either a template for his novel, Platform, or perhaps the boiled-down version of the major themes in his previous works.

But then it is Houellebecq (pronounced Wellbeck) and if you're a fan, as I am, you will probably want to read it. If you have never read Houellebecq, Lanzarote is as good, and easy, a place to start as any.

For even if you disagree with the grumpy old devil, even if at times he infuriates you, the quality of his writing is unarguable. Funny, lucid, perceptive and bristling with ideas, Houellebecq is a literary tonic.

There's nothing quite like the ruminations of this splenetic Frenchman as far as I know, though quite what he's on about often eludes me. I'm not alone, thank goodness. Houellebecq, it seems, is a puzzle to much of his audience. Once the darling of the left, he has also been accused of being a right-wing pornographer.

Following the publication of Atomised in 1998, for my money the most successful Houellebecq novel, he was expelled from the board of a left-wing literary journal he had helped to found. Unrepentant, Houellebecq publicly wished for their imminent collapse.

Even better, he behaves just as a nihilistic French writer should. Frequently drunk, unremarkable in appearance, apparently monosyllabic and, until recently, loveless. But even though he is now married and lives in Ireland, clearly things are still not looking up in Houellebecq's fictional world.

Lanzarote traverses familiar Houellebecq themes and style - his preoccupation with sex, his view of travel as a mutually beneficial, hedonistic pursuit, his misanthropy and misogyny and his disgust with religion, in particular Islam.

The latter is almost bloody-minded, given that earlier statements critical of Islam landed him in court in France charged with inciting racial hatred. Fortunately for Houellebecq, and our narrator, there are no Muslims in Lanzarote. Which is one of the reasons he chooses to holiday there.

Lanzarote is the most easterly of the major Canary Islands and it is where our narrator, typically lonely and unlovely, chooses to spend the first weeks of the new millennium.

Apart from plentiful sun and warm water all year round, Lanzarote offers nothing much else since it is largely a volcanic wasteland since suffering a series of cataclysmic eruptions almost 300 years ago. Naturally our resourceful narrator manages to add sex with lesbians to the mix and almost has a satisfying holiday.

But perhaps the fragile, lunar Lanzarote is the point - we are all fiddling while beneath us Rome burns.

Actually it's a police inspector from Luxembourg who is finally accused of fiddling - with children, and without a hint of remorse.

Luckless Rudi is probably the most interesting and miserable character in the book. Disenchanted with his work, he's in a bad way. He is convinced Brussels is on the brink of civil war and is in despair over his marriage after his Moroccan wife forsook him for fundamentalist Islam, taking their two children with her.

Too depressed to bonk, Rudi takes up with a loony fictional cult called the Azraelians - sounding and behaving not unlike the Raelians - and it's only a matter of time before this sect, and our policeman, are accused of paedophilia.

Even Houellebecq's favourite cure for what ails us - the redemptive powers of sex - fails this time.

It is all terribly depressing and grouchy and, oddly, comic and uplifting at the same time.

What can I say? It's vintage Houellebecq.

Random House, $34.95

* Yvonne van Dongen is an Auckland travel writer.