Atomised (Michel Houellebecq)

Existentialism is widely held to be the experience of one's own freedom of thought and responsibility and the angst created by the realisation that all of our acts are essentially futile. In France, this school of philosophical thought has long been prominent, and I personally first encountered it while studying A Level French, when I studied Albert Camus and his seminal novels 'L'Étranger' ('The Outsider') and 'La Peste' ('The Plague') in the original French, with later re-reads in translation. As an impressionable and angst-ridden teenager, these books had a profound effect on me and seemed to fit my world view better than anything else I had come across. The master of modern Existentialist Fiction is another Frenchman, Michel Houellebecq, whose novels have caused a substantial stir with their frank (some would say pronographic) representations of modern sexuality and their blunt take on the phenomenon of death. A substantial theme in Houellebecq's work is the decay of modern society, and his debut novel 'Atomised' ('Les Particules Eléméntaires' in the orginal French) takes on this theme with wit and brio.

The plot is narrated by a detached third person figure of complete omniscience, who cooly and logically tells us of the lives of two half-brothers, Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clément. Michel is an introverted molecular biologist who once dreamed of being a physicist like his hero Nihls Bohr and has no interest in sex, women or friendship. As the novel opens he is taking a leave of absence from his post at the university to rethink his existence. Bruno is a theoretical libertine, a sex addict who has no outlet for his lewdness and for whom therapy for his sex addiction has no effect whatsoever. The opening of the novel sees  leaving therapy and on his way to a hippy retreat where he hopes he will find the meaningless sexual encounters he so craves. The brothers are entirely different, but their inability to make sense of the modern world is the same, and through them, Houellebecq is able to make the ultimate Existentialist point: that it is love that holds the human race back.

'Atomised' has an interesting structure, in that it begins in 1999 with Michel taking his leave of absence, then recounts the dysfunctional childhood the brothers experienced, then moves into the brothers experiencing chances at redemption that ultimately fall flat, and finally to the ultimate revelation that a scientific discovery made by Michel changed humanity forever. I did find the very last section of the book to be forced and found it unsuccessful in applying a kind of 'Brave New World' dystopian feel to the novel. It felt very tagged on, to me, even though it was clear from the start that the narrative was being framed by knowledge of a very different future to the present being described.

Overall, this novel has a dark, broodingm, foreboding tone that makes it fit perfectly into the troubled years leading up to and following the last millenium. The characterisation of the two protagonists is perfectly observed and the plot has plenty of dark nooks and crannies to hook the reader into continuing to turn the page. Is this as good a book as its influences? No, not at all. But is it a significant achievement in the field of Existentialist literature? Absolutely.