Review: “Annihilation”
Michel Houellebecq’s “Annihilation” turns its way through dull romance, empty politics and day-to-day domesticity.
Weaving through economic collapse, moral decline, and existential angst in a near-future France. It is surprisingly unironic. Tinged with gentle, unexpected tenderness.
Like many of Houellebecq’s novels it begins with the end of a man, the slow erosion of what once passed for a man. An extended sigh of a life not quite lived, the bureaucratic limbo of a civilisation not quite dead.
Paul Raison - a middle-aged functionary with thinning hair and thinning hopes - drifts through this entropy with something like grace. A worn-down civility, a willingness to endure.
The novel opens in the year 2027, a date close enough to the present to still reek of its decay. France, as ever, is on the verge of collapse. The presidential elections are approaching, but everyone already knows nothing will change. The usual games are played—media manipulation, administrative jockeying, a few murmurs of terrorism.
Paul serves as an advisor to Bruno Juge, the finance minister. But like everyone, Paul no longer believes in politics. Nor does he believe in love, work, or democracy. His marriage is disintegrating with slow, professional efficiency. His father, a retired intelligence officer, has suffered a stroke and now lies mute and in a care facility. His sister has found religion, his younger brother is lost. Everyone is alienated from everyone else, but no one is surprised.
There are ruminations on cyberterrorism, the limits of democracy, and the encroaching merger between the human and the algorithmic. There are meditations on death - not dramatic deaths, but the kind administered in hospital corridors, under flickering fluorescent lights, where a man is reduced to stupefied flesh and data. Kept alive by machines.
A series of bizarre deepfake videos appears online, threatening various members of the government. There are hints of a shadowy conspiracy, something between Anonymous and a particularly misanthropic philosophy seminar. But to expect a thriller is to misunderstand the point. These incidents are pretexts for melancholy, for long digressions on the nature of suffering, aging, and the impossibility of intimacy.
Paul’s reconciliation with his estranged wife is awkward, human, and touched by something like grace. His confrontation with mortality - first his father’s, then his own - leads not to enlightenment, but to a quiet sort of faith. Not in a god, exactly. But in tenderness, in flesh, in the possibility of meaning amidst the collapse.
Is it a great novel? I doubt it. Great novels are no longer possible. But it is, I think, a necessary one.
It shows us what we would rather not see, and then, in a final act of mercy, allows a glimpse of something better. Something truer.
Not utopia. Not redemption. But perhaps a moment of unmediated human contact before the machines take over completely.
C’est la mort.