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the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction



Annihilation

by
Michel Houellebecq


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase Annihilation


Title: Annihilation
Author: Michel Houellebecq
Genre: Novel
Written: 2022 (Eng. 2024)
Length: 526 pages
Original in: French
Availability: Annihilation - US
Annihilation - UK
Annihilation - Canada
Anéantir - Canada
Anéantir - France
Vernichten - Deutschland
Annientare - Italia
Aniquilación - España
from: Bookshop.org (US)
  • French title: Anéantir
  • Translated by Shaun Whiteside
  • With several illustrations

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Our Assessment:

B : somewhat unfocused, but enough that makes it worthwhile

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
The Economist . 12/2/2022 .
The Guardian . 13/9/2024 Sam Byers
Literary Review . 9/2024 Bartolomeo Sala
London Rev. of Books . 5/12/2024 Adam Mars-Jones
NZZ A 11/1/2022 Benedict Neff
New Statesman . 21/1/2022 Andrew Hussey
New Statesman . 17/9/2024 Rob Doyle
The NY Times Book Rev. D- 20/10/2024 Dwight Garner
The Observer . 8/9/2024 Anthony Cummins
El País . 23/6/2022 Javier Aparicio Maydeu
The Spectator B 21/9/2024 David Sexton
The Telegraph B+ 5/9/2024 Camilla Grudova
The Times . 20/9/2024 Michael Gove
TLS . 18/3/2022 Nelly Kaprielian


  Review Consensus:

  No consensus, but everyone agrees it's a softer, more sentimental Houellebecq here

  From the Reviews:
  • "As ever, French literary critics have lamented Mr Houellebecq's flat prose. But it is well-suited to conveying the crushing mediocrity of both his characters' relationships and the physical landscape they inhabit. (...) From a novelist best-known for his nihilistic outlook, this upbeat arc is striking. (...) The last part of the novel takes an unusually tender turn." - The Economist

  • "Largely purged of the provocation and gleeful unpleasantness of his earlier work, Annihilation feels instead suffused with a particular kind of sadness -- overwhelming, numbing, at times deliberately and maddeningly boring. (...) Annihilation is a lengthy novel, and Houellebecq labours to make it feel longer. The colour palette is overwhelmingly grey; tension is almost superstitiously avoided. (...) Like most of Houellebecq’s work, though, the book sharpens as it advances." - Sam Byers, The Guardian

  • "The larger architecture of Annihilation is altogether odd. (...) Well researched or not, the book’s thriller plot comes to nothing, not so much botched as abandoned. The dramas in the Raison family hog the stage, and Houellebecq knows his craft well enough to make them chewy and nutritious, not to mention wry, sour and droll by turns. It’s still an eccentric piece of planning to start the meal with red meat and then follow it with bowl after bowl of muesli. It’s fine to despise genre fiction -- just don’t import its tropes without putting them to good use or showing them the proper respect. (...) Towards the end of the book Houellebecq seems to lose all sense of what material belongs in the narrative and what doesn’t." - Adam Mars-Jones, London Review of Books

  • "Houellebecq gibt sich in Vernichten zwar nicht als besonderer Ästhet zu erkennen. Dafür beherrscht er aber auf ingeniöse Weise die Ironie. Alles vermag er in der Vieldeutigkeit zu halten. Famos verbindet er eine mitunter auf Macron und sein Kabinett anspielende Satire mit einer Persiflage auf zeitgenössische Esoterik sowie einer schauerlichen Dystopie über die «Vernichtung des Westens». Im Fokus steht allem voran der Verlust des Privaten und eine Pornografisierung aller Lebensbereiche." - Benedict Neff, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

  • "In truth, much of the book is a slog. (...) The premise of the novel is intriguing but the pace is slow. It slackens further as we spend more time with Raison (.....) The plot becomes even more convoluted and at times you have the feeling of reading three books at once. The writing is often flat and overloaded with detail. There are too many digressions. Yet the book quickens when Paul's personal life is disrupted by the news that his father has had a stroke. (...) These final chapters are moving as Houellebecq displays compassion and empathy, and a belief in the redemptive power of love. Far beyond politics, these are the real themes of the book." - Andrew Hussey, New Statesman

  • "Annihilation is disappointing -- overlong, enervated, often clumsy, intellectually crude. It’s the only Houellebecq book I doubt I’ll ever reread, and the only one that, had I not been reading it for review, I might not have bothered to finish. (...) There are further shortcomings: flimsy plotting; lazy, inelegant sentences; hollow characters too obviously serving as cyphers of human frailty and abjection, or as mouthpieces for the author’s own philosophical attitudes. But these flaws are nothing new in Houellebecq" - Rob Doyle, New Statesman

  • "(I)t gets off to a slow start, so slow that I debated abandoning my copy on a subway seat so that it could depress another passenger. That seemed cruel and random, so I hung on and finished it. The second half of this 527-page (but longer-seeming) novel is even more tedious and disengaged than the first. (...) The plot of Annihilation grows in so many directions that it is like a tree without a trunk. (...) The writing in Annihilation is slack, as if Houellebecq’s heart were not in it. There are many failed epigrams. He’s an arsonist who has lost his matches." - Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

  • "What does it have to offer ? Something of a hotchpotch (.....) The plot’s wild twists and turns compete for the reader’s interest with Houellebecq’s usual grandstanding on culture and society. (...) The way the novel keeps drilling down remorselessly into desire and aspiration as a matter of sex and shelter can’t help but be funny, and after all these years there’s still a tang to Houellebecq’s bluntness, for good and ill." - Anthony Cummins, The Observer

  • "A compassionate, deeply affecting novel about love and death and the way we treat the dying. That this is the real subject of the story emerges ever more clearly as it progresses. The election passes uneventfully and the cyber-terrorism plot is pretty much forgotten by the end. This is a text that could have been improved by revision or simple abridgement (.....) Annihilation is far from faultless (...). The paratactic, comma-heavy style Houellebecq adopts here can read as a bit disorganised in English (and there are some surprising misprisions in the translation, too). Yet it's a novel of massive ambition, worthy of Balzac, deeply embedded in the reality of France, telling truths that come, in the end, straight from Pascal." - David Sexton, The Spectator

  • "In all these characters’ actions, Houellebecq teases and confuses our moral compass, as any good novelist should do. (...) We’re given Houellebecq at his most tender-hearted and vulnerable. At its heart, though, Annihilation is a novel about death, and the many ways to die: cancer, terrorist attacks, drowning on a migrant boat. What is a good death, and what is it in relation to a good life ?" - Camilla Grudova, The Telegraph

  • "Annihilation comes as something of a departure. Many of the familiar Houellebecq themes and tropes are there (.....) But there is also a sympathy, compassion and tenderness that is much stronger and more pronounced than in previous work. (...) The terrorist narrative is, sadly, less coherent. There is a credulity-straining lurch into satanic inspiration, which may be a nod to the thinking of the counter-revolutionary ideologue de Maistre, but the plotline fizzles out unsatisfactorily. What endures and indeed impresses most about the book is Paul’s reconnection with his family during these events and his eventual reckoning with his own mortality in the final 80 pages, which are moving and elegiac." - Michael Gove, The Times

  • "As in his previous novels, but here with even greater disillusionment, it is the edifice of consumer capitalism that Houellebecq ostensibly takes aim at, but he is either oblivious (or maybe desirous) of the collateral damage that will be caused to democratic institutions by its destruction -- one that will inevitably involve violence and terrorism from extremists of both right and left. (...) Houellebecq has always had a distinctive style: deadpan, witty, sometimes brutal and littered with pop-cultural references, but with Anéantir something has changed: the writing is diluted, solely functional, and the dry, cutting humour has gone; reading him just isn't as much fun as it used to be. (...) I'm not saying that Michel Houellebecq is necessarily of the extreme-right, that this novel is a pledge of support for Zemmour or Le Pen, or that he votes for extreme-right parties or candidates (...). However, in Anéantir the perspective he adopts is that of the extreme-right, and the fictional world of the novel is presented completely in those terms." - Nelly Kaprielian, Times Literary Supplement

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Annihilation is set in a near-future France, opening in late-2026, with the French presidential elections, scheduled for 2027, looming. The main character, Paul Raison, is a member of the present cabinet, working under the Minister of the Economy and Finance, Bruno Juge, and in the opening chapters the DGSI -- the General Directorate of Internal Security -- is dealing with technically very advanced hacking, notably the appearance of a (deepfake) video on government sites showing the guillotining of Juge.
       In a Putinesque maneuver, the French president -- unnamed, but surely real-life president Emmanuel Macron --, who is term-limited from standing for office again, backs Benjamin Sarfati for the presidency, and Juge is to play an important role in the election campaign, and then continue in his job in the new administration -- though: "maybe I'll be appointed Prime Minister at first, but not for long". The president's big plan, however, is to change the constitution -- "to move to a real presidential regime" (resembling the system in the United States more than the existing French one). Everyone expects the election to come down to a two-person race, with a show-down between Sarfati and the candidate of the far-right Le Pen-party, the National Rally, expected in the second round of voting. (In French presidential elections, if no one receives more than fifty per cent of the votes in the first round of voting a second round is held between the two candidates who received the most votes; given France's multi-party, multi-candidate system all presidential elections under the Fifth Republic save the first (indirect) one -- i.e. since 1965 -- have gone into a second round; in Annihilation the top two vote-getters only receive 27 and 20 per cent of the vote respectively in the first round.)
       Workaholic Juge leans some on Pierre, but doesn't demand too much of him. The apparent terrorist actions continue at a relatively low level, but don't cause much more than a ripple; they occasionally bubble over into the story. Only after the first round of the elections -- when: "the novelty's starting to wear off a little" with these hacks, as Paul puts it -- do the terrorists make a more dramatic and consequential statement -- even as it remains a mystery what they're after. (As someone tells Paul: "nothing in this case has seemed to make sense since the outset", and Houellebecq leaves it pretty much at that.)
       Houellebecq lets this terror-plot simmer lightly in the background, adding a dash of wicca and the occasional pentagram -- there are some helpful illustrations, as well -- along with lines of computer code as well as a mysterious connection to Paul's dad (who used to work for the DGSI), but all this, and politics as a whole, figure largely as little more than background color. Certainly, Annihilation is in part a state-of-the-nation novel, but the political system and the elections -- and most of the would-be terror-plot -- are mere scaffolding here, with Houellebecq unable to muster much interest especially in the tired, predictable political proceedings.
       In action, the democratic system, in (near) present-day France seems fairly hopeless to him -- with , for example, Paul and his sister Cécile having consistently voted in line with their situations -- unthinkingly, basically --, with Paul not holding it against Cécile and her husband for having repeatedly voted "for Marine" [Le Pen], and even acknowledging that: "if he lived in Arras, he too probably would have voted for Marine".
       Rather than debating matters of substance, political discussion falls into the most predictable patterns:

Zemmour always works, you just have to say his name and the conversation starts purring along brightly signposted and pleasantly predictable tracks, a bit like Georges Marchais in his day, everyone finds his social markers, his natural place, and draws calm satisfaction from it.
       And, even more fundamentally, even politician Juge sums up: "democracy is dead as a system, it's too slow, too ponderous".
       Houellebecq does toss in mentions of some extremist ideas, such as those of John Zerzan, who: "wanted not only to destroy industry, trade and modern technology, but also to abolish agriculture, religions, the arts and even articulated language; his project, in fact, was to bring humanity back to the level of the middle Palaeolithic era", but doesn't really do anything with them. Even a significant terrorist attack just plays into the hands of the system, with the outgoing president able to turn it to his (and his preferred candidate's) advantage -- "he's really played a blinder", Juge judges. So also, by the time the story gets around to the second round of the presidential election, Paul still goes through all the expected motions -- "I need to vote, though", he tells his wife, and himself, in what has become an automatism -- and he even makes it to the polling station and queues up to vote before: "realizing that he didn't really care very much about taking part in the vote" and walking out without doing so.
       The democratic process has become an irrelevancy -- but that's only incidental to the novel, anyway, just one more way in which France has gone wrong. In Annihilation, Houellebecq is much more concerned with the personal than the political, with Paul -- though of course part of his malaise is just a reflection of the general, national one. But Houellebecq doesn't offer an entirely despairing picture: turning ever more inwards, Paul finds some meaning, some happiness, even, after a very long time, some satisfying sexual release ..... Sure, it takes an unpleasant terminal illness for him to face things, but, hey, .....
       Paul is in what is, at the start of the novel, a loveless marriage. He and his wife Prudence still live together, but lead essentially entirely separate lives -- living on different schedules, sleeping in separate bedrooms --, to the extent that they barely even bump into each other any more. Paul, approaching fifty -- he celebrates his fiftieth birthday in 2027 --, seems to have basically given up on intimate relations (he had even: "completely stopped masturbating"), too, and between work and home leads a weird, in many ways almost zombie-like life. In typical Houellebecq fashion, however, the couple continue their descents side by side:
As members of social class AB, they had no plans to stray from accepted norms, and placed great importance on the breakdown of their partnership occurring under the most civilized conditions possible.
       (The French obsession with class and societal strictures generally rears its heavy head repeatedly here, with Houellebecq falling for it too -- though it does at least let him show off his dry wit at his best, as when he writes of Paul's wife: "With a father who was a judge in Versailles, with his main residence in Ville-d'Avray, a holiday home in Brittany, educated at Sainte-Geneviève, then at Sciences Po and ENA, basically there was nothing surprising about Prudence turning out asexual and vegan".)
       Paul has other problems, too, with his father suffering a massive cerebral infarction (ischemic stroke), unable to move -- except, eventually, to blink, allowing him to communicate. This family tragedy brings Paul together with his very devout sister, Cécile, married to unemployed notary Hervé, as well as younger brother Aurélien, unhappily married to journalist Indy, ten years his senior. (Apparently unable to conceive naturally, the couple had resorted to IVF -- or rather, Indy had had her way, including -- in her: "desire to assert her independent spirit, her non-conformity and her anti-racism all at the same time", Paul speculates -- getting a Black sperm donor. Paul finds: "Their son was the worst".)
       Among the escapades in the novel is one where the family free their father from the nursing home he is initially sent to -- a peculiarity of French bureaucracy that might seem bizarre to many foreign readers, who would imagine the family had every right to keep the father wherever they wanted, as long as he is properly cared for. This illegal action has a variety of ramifications for some of those involved, including for Paul in his official position -- though in this age it proves to be little more than the scandal du jour, causing little lasting damage to him (or the presidential campaign that he, through Juge, is involved in).
       In any case, soon enough Paul has bigger problems. There's some early foreshadowing -- a third of the way in the novel, on the last day of 2026: "he developed a headache and a bad taste spread in his mouth, something fetid, and he couldn't wait for New Year's Eve to finish" -- but it's quite a while before he gets what he thinks is just a tooth issue looked at. That New Year's Eve he already worries about what lies ahead in 2027 -- "He really didn't like this year, there was something repellent about the combination of those figures", he muses; god forbid there'd be any rational thought behind his concerns ..... But, eventually reality hits him, hard. He has cancer, it's quite well-advanced and hard to get to, and the treatment options are unpleasant.
       While he and Prudence manage to fall for each other again, the outlook for Paul is bleak, and the final part of the novel focuses entirely on the limited treatment he undergoes and his soon inevitable decline. Yes, Annihilation concludes as a mushy-philosophical novel about mortality and the meanings of life. Turning entirely inward, the state of the nation and the poitical situation fade into a distant blur -- fair enough, but a bit of a shame, since Houellebecq is most entertaining in his commentary on that kind of thing. Paul's facing his illness and then death is done well enough as well, but drawn out as it is (or at least certainly feels) it doesn't really offer all that much.
       At least Paul is a reasonably fully-presented character, the book focusing almost entirely on his life and path (with a few brief, odd detours where the focus shifts to other characters). Cécile is also quite well-drawn and utilized -- a reasonably full character -- but too many others are far too thin, notably Prudence and, somewhat more understandably, Paul's father (with whom it is then still possible to communicate, at least to the extent that he can respond 'yes' or 'no' by blinking). Houellebecq does several of the relationships quite well -- Cécile and her husband; the woman who is completely devoted to Paul's father -- and surprisingly many of the relationships are happy ones, including that of Paul and Prudence, with even Aurélien (briefly) finding love (though it is his wife, Indy, -- "a piece of shit, and a venal piece of shit at that" -- who is the most entertainingly nasty of the characters). Juge, though perhaps too perfect in his dedicated professionalism, is also an important partner for Paul -- even if it remains unclear what Paul actually does for him --, with Paul understanding: "Bruno was a stroke of luck, the only stroke of luck in his life; he had conquered everything else by competition and struggle". (Juge's efficient manner, and many contacts, prove helpful to Paul with some of his personal issues as well.)
       If the story in Annihilation is a bit lame, and what plot there is unfocused, there's considerable enjoyment to be had in the more familiar Houellebecqian touches. The general societal critiques and musings on a wide variety of aspects of modern life are nicely sharp and biting, and Houellebecq's confidence in his claims and opinions is part of the fun:
As soon as the child reaches the shores of adolescence, the first task assumed by the child is to destroy the couple formed by its parents, and in particular to destroy it in sexual terms; the child cannot under any circumstances bear its parents engaging in sexual activity, particularly with each other, it logically considers that from the moment of its birth that activity no longer has any reason to continue, and is henceforth only a disgusting old people's vice. This is not exactly what Freud taught; but Freud did not understand much about it in any case.
       Sex plays a significant role in Annihilation, or at least is much discussed and mentioned; as usual in Houellebecq's fiction, his protagonist has a variety of issues with it, including a long period of an in every respect sex-less life (followed then by a once again fulfilling one).
       Literature figures prominently, too, from Balzac -- with Annihilation certainly having Balzacian ambitions (and not doing too bad in achieving them) -- to Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, to Philippe Lançon's Disturbance, as Paul turns to books especially in dealing with his illness. (Paul's immobilized father is also able to read; oddly, his companion Madeleine does not read out loud to him, but rather simply turns his pages -- of the Pléiade volume of the Comédie humaine, for example ("As a rule he preferred reading classics, particularly Balzac, but also a detective novel from time to time").)
       Houellebecq also resorts to presenting many of Paul's dreams -- perhaps in the hope of livening the plot up, with short little scenes that are more striking and event-filled ..... And there are a few far-fetched turns and events, none more so than Paul's surprise-encounter with one of Cécile's daughters -- vintage Houellebecq, in part, but also rather ridiculous (though, beyond its improbability, it and its resolution work quite well).
       It's a bit of an unwieldy mess of a novel, but Paul is strong enough a character, his situation(s) compelling enough to sustain interest, with Houellebecq's many observations and tangents adding prickly fun. There is a lot littered in here -- enough to make for a rewarding read.

- M.A.Orthofer, 23 October 2024

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Links:

Annihilation: Reviews: Michel Houellebecq: Other books by Michel Houellebecq under review: Other books of interest under review:
  • See also the Index of French literature at the complete review

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About the Author:

       French author Michel Houellebecq was born in 1958.

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© 2024 the complete review

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