Submission - Michel Houellebecq (2015)
Houellebecq's brand of sly, smug nihilism is a guilty pleasure, or at least it would be if one were foolish enough to feel guilty for reading books. His gross, borderline hateful, wink at the audience shtick worked well in Platform and Atomised. In Submission, it all feels a little close to self-parody.
Submission's protagonist, François, is a bored, listless middle aged academic, who, when he's not fucking his students, is pondering the mundanity of life. Quelle surprise! There are some salient points here about the futility of academia, and some rather less salient points about various pseudoscience and relationships. For Houellebecq, I mean, his protagonist, women are broadly interchangeable chattels, with little value unless they are sufficiently pert allow the increasingly middle aged author, sorry, protagonist, to achieve an errection. Yes, there's something of a fan fiction self insert protag in François, and when his excellent, clear and concise writing style is praised, along with his early successful writing career it's difficult not to clench everything involuntarily.
François is barely mentioned on the blurb. In fact, the more salacious aspects of this book, the rise and subsequent implementation of a fundamentalist Muslim party party in France instead forms a suitably nihilistic backdrop to the Don DeLillo-esque academic shenanigans (Houellebeq mentions in a smug postscript that he never went to university, but he's got the modern university novel format spot-on). The rise isn't entirely convincing. Houellebecq isn't very tech savvy, and much of it is explained away with young people looking at compelling websites with "catchy music".
In fact technology is strangely absent in this book, published in early 2015, where an ill-defined media blackout also seems to make everyone forget their smartphones exist. Digitally convergent media was already a significant catalyst for the dissemination of ideology and the establishment of political coups long before the book was written, which makes this much lauded as prescient glimpse in to the future anything but convincing. Instead Houellebecq decides to resort to enormous exposition dumps, delivered by Francois's acquaintances, including, rather fortunately, a secret agent and a literary professor with links to the far-right nativist movements.
It wouldn't be Houellebecq without bad sex and there are several cringe-inducing scenes scattered throughout, for difficult to discern reasons, other than functioning as an autueristic calling card. Perhaps it's to present one of overwritten contradictions at the heart of the narrative; while François is preoccupied with acquiring firm, young flesh, he is beset with an almost fetishistic lust for dusty old tomes and conservative values, at one point spending a month in a small village staring in quiet wonder at a statue of the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus. François, the de facto expert in 19th Century French author Joris-Karl Huysmans choses (or perhaps is forced) to use Huysmans' idealised and distant life as a sort of metanarrative, clinging to this distant mythos as a means of numbing the quietly encroaching submission he is forced to partake. Perhaps, by chasing his own debauched longings in perpetuity and sliding in to mediocrity, he is a metonym for the inevitable demise of Western chauvinistic values. Ultimately, the typically detached sex scenes read like garnish to spice up an otherwise flaccid political-lite pot boiler. It isn't nearly spicy enough to titilate lovers of smut or indeed racists: besides a few politically incorrect streams of consciousness here and there, it feels strangely compelled to draw parallels between a hypothetical European Islam and traditional European conservatism, which is hardly scandalous.
But aside from all its many faults, Submission works as a good old fashioned exercise in existentialist hand-wringing, and the sense of impending doom is refreshingly bleak and straightforward. The malaise of middle class white mediocrity in the ill defined face of a rapidly encroaching other is somewhat compelling. François muses, much like we surely all have, that he knew that the end times were coming, yet he rather thought he'd be dead by the time that they did. Even as the welfare state, public transport and the rights of women are dissolved, the protagonist receives a comfortable pension, drinks his weight in booze and ponders suicide. I'm sure there are some thought provoking, if unpleasant points on sexual economy and patriarchy here too. This comfortable complacency of the middle class and its institutions being suddenly eroded is certainly compelling, if not at all convincing.
Cop Killer - Donald Gorgon (1994)
Published by The X Press, a 90's British black interest publisher most famous for releasing Victor Headley's Yardie trilogy, Cop Killer is an endearingly grimy pulp thriller, elevated by many levels due to it's laboriously detailed inner-city London setting and representation of early 90's black British culture. Plotwise: your standard Blaxploitation revenge potboiler with a London twist. Lloyd Baker's mother is killed by a trio of impressively disgusting racist cops, which leads him on a rip-roaring riot of revenge across the capital. Think Taxi Driver, but with more Jamaican patois and council estates. Even in 2021, it feels refreshing to read genre fiction with such a diverse range of black characters (and some hilariously reductive white stereotypes chucked in as comic relief of bullet fodder). The book completely falls to pieces in the last 50 pages and ends in a hilariously haphazard and truncated manner, but that's just all part of the charm.
The Beach - Alex Garland (1996)
Every time I read a book like this, it makes me think of The Davinci Code. Not because I have read or have ever read The Davinci Code, but because this is a page turner. It is written in such a way as to make you turn pages. You gotta turn those pages. Though some might look disdainfully at books like this, there's an absolute art to it. Daido Moriyama wrote that he feels a great deal of respect, and even jealousy of photographers who take perfect pictures for postcards. While Moriyama's trashy, filthy, grungy aesthetic seems to be utterly antithetical of anything that deliberately tries to look nice just because (and it probably is), he recognises that there is significant artistry in formalism and populism. So, The Beach is a picture postcard book. It is what Adorno would refer to as "pre-digested". It rattles directly through your synapses, using every manipulative literary device and element of layout to drive your eyes downwards to the end of the page with as much efficacy as possible. This is in no way a criticism. After reading the first thirty or so pages, I started to wonder why all books are not written like this. Also, I started reading this when I was delirious through fever and simultaneously looking after my seven month old daughter, which only became more fitting as time progressed.
While the book is written with such tactical precision, the thematic implications are rather more subtly existential, and surprisingly so. The novel's broadest theme is apathy, mistrust, and increasingly hatred of outsiders. The dichotomous relationship between seasoned travelers adventurous spirit and their dislike of the other is taken to its logical and grotesque conclusion. None of the characters share any interests or attitude to human relationships beyond a shared interest in travel. Not one character reads a book. Refreshingly, the most pure relationship is forged over a Gameboy. While Garland is a skilled writer, his lack of experience with videogames is faintly embarrassing. Which is a shame because gamification and the videogames as metanarrative is one of the meatier themes to be only partially explored here. The protagonist views life through the prism of videogames, and they are pretty much the only thing he is able to meaningfully relate to. Yet games themselves tend to be referenced in a facile and fleeting manner. Luckily Garland more than makes up for these shortcoming in his much later limited TV series DEVS, which also focuses on simulation, simulacra and utopia.
The notion of utopia explored here is similarly fascinating. The idyll of the beach is devoid not only of overarching political ideologies, but also of culture, nuance and interest. The citizens of the beach sit around, smoke pot, do their job and chat shit about where they've been on their worldly adventures, paradoxically seemingly content to remain in absolute stasis in perpetuity. It's genuinely difficult to pinpoint the exact moment where the boring Eden collapses in to banal hideousness. The beach is a simulacrum of society; hyperreal and hyperexclusive, like any nation state. There are jobs and bosses and shopping trips and even work socials: read 20 years later, the book reads like a save critique of corporate culture in 2021 rather than a broader comment on societal malaise. That even this apolitical, capitalist-adjacent microcosm of society collapses so suddenly is faintly satisfying.
I hate hot climates and beaches and sand and sleeping in tents and talking to strangers so the whole experience was ghastly and unrelatable from the very first page. Perhaps this is the preferred reading; I genuinely hope that none of these awful people are supposed to elicit affection from the reader. I'm tempted to watch the Danny Boyle adaptation, but it seems a little superfluous to dramatise such a superfluous and artfully slight narrative.