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the complete review - fiction

Platform

by
Michel Houellebecq

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

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Our Assessment:

B+ : an uneven but always interesting novel

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus, with almost no one completely enthusiastic

  From the Reviews:

• "Houellebecq's work is cynical and anomic but also literary and complex, and its characters contain contradictions." - Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly
  
  
• "It is a novel of ideas, but if that phrase makes you want to reach for your pistol, it also comes with a well-crafted plot, a cast of fully fleshed characters and sex scenes that could stop the traffic. (...) Houellebecq adapts his writing well to the demands of his plot. His style is understated, deadpan and often explanatory, reminiscent of Sartre or Camus. The novel is very funny, but this does not detract from the tension." - Toby Clements, Daily Telegraph
  
  
• "Der so zwischen privater Lust- und touristischer Geschäftsstrategie sich entwickelnde Roman mündet in jene skandalträchtige Realitätsabbildung, die Houellebecq geschickt zwischen Provokation, Spekulation und literarischer Masche schillern läßt" - Joseph Hanimann, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "Im Satirischen, vor allem bei der Beschreibung der Thailand-Rundreise im ersten Teil, liegen die Stärken von Plattform. (...) Der Verlag wirbt mit dem Slogan, dies sei der erste Liebesroman Houellebecqs. Das ist vielleicht richtig, nur ist das kein Vorzug, sondern macht das größte Manko des Buchs deutlich." - Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "For the smug British reader, Platform will seem nothing so much as a resurrection of the old anti-liberal, anti-semitic, anti-Dreyfusard tradition in French thought and society. Actually, continental liberalism is under assault from two directions. In reality, Michel is indistinguishable from his own bêtes noires, the unassimilated Muslims. His view of European culture -- scary, over-feminised, lonely, demeaning, faithless -- is that of the worst sort of low-grade Muslim propaganda. Whole sections of Platform reminded me of the Saudi newspapers of 20 years ago. Michel is the Muslims' friend." - James Buchan, The Guardian
  
  
• "It addresses everything -- love, death, religion, the nature of the individual, the meaning of life -- but is coherent on nothing. (...) But if he is frequently incoherent in his general pronouncements, he is ingenious in his local insights." - Christina Nehring, Harper's
  
  
• "Platform impresses mightily with its close-focus attention to the callous business of creating, and exploiting, the desires of all these clapped-out hedonists. (...) More surprisingly, the novel doesn't merely run on irony and rancour. Michel's rat-on-a-wheel Paris routine plangently captures the melancholy of sex-saturated consumer culture, with its victims trapped "like insects in lumps of amber"." - Boyd Tonkin, The Independent
  
  
• "Michel’s glimpse of lifelong happiness becomes a measure of the depths of the misery to which he will soon be violently returned. The novel ends in resignation and despair, but along the way it accommodates a skewed and lyrical vision of romantic longing and fulfillment. Céline would have been shocked -- and perhaps a little jealous." - Geoff Dyer, LA Weekly
  
  
• "Houellebecq's earnest wish to idealise sex as a balm for Western ills leads him to make some dodgy narrative moves. (...) It has enough of the curt wit and cruel, aphoristic truth seen in his previous books (...0 to make it worth reading to the end. (...) Platform is a lumpy book." - James Meek, London Review of Books
  
  
• "Houellebecq's deadpan description of a France colonized by American products and ideas is the background to what will be Michel's great notion. Like all Houellebecq heroes, Michel only finds relief in sex (.....) The book has been translated into rather polite English, which is a pity. Only the informality of American language could convey the edge that makes Houellebecq's writing so remarkable, and so hilarious, in French." - Joan Juliet Buck, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "(A) subtler, more daring and more politically explicit work even than Atomised" - Andrew Hussey, New Statesman
  
  
• "Platform is certainly full of witty, unhinged attacks against Islam -- characters are introduced for no other reason than to deliver page-length denunciations of true believers. But Muslims ought not to be unduly offended. Houellebecq is a writer of perpetual attack. Protestants, capitalists, liberal-leftists, the revolutionary generation of 1968, the French, les Anglo-Saxons, hippies, Frederick Forsyth -- all these are among his targets. There is considerable comedy in Houellebecq's wild misanthropy. There is also a peculiar poignancy." - Jason Cowley, New Statesman
  
  
• "Platform is calculated to poke, prod, engorge, enrage and amuse the complacent reader of today. It’s dangerous in the way that literature is meant to be dangerous -- that is, it awakens neglected sensibilities." - Benjamin Anastas, The New York Observer
  
  
• "Platform would be a better novel if its central character had a life -- any life -- of his own. (...) Mr. Houellebecq's chic petulance and abundant salaciousness become part and parcel of his philosophy. This makes for a polarizing, audacious document rather than a viable novel." - Janet Maslin, The New York Times
  
  
• "Is it fair to demand of novels that they be articulate and reasonable, that they attempt in some way to make the world a better place ? If so, Platform is a disaster, poorly organized and incoherent and rather crass. (...) If nothing else, Platform makes an imaginative purchase on an undeniably actual strand in turn-of-the-century Europe" - Jenny Turner, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "((T)he translation, throughout, is exemplary). (...) There are problems with the narrative, officially a first-person account by Michel R., but one that (insolently ?—well, anyway, unjustifiedly) dodges into the third person if it needs to tell us what only Michel H. can know. (There is even an incompetent moment when Michel R. gives us his judgment on a character he hasn’t yet met.) (...) The sense of Houellebecq’s being a clever man who is a less than clever novelist obtrudes most in the novel’s dealings with Islam." - Julian Barnes, The New Yorker
  
  
• "Reading Platform, one realises again and again what a flimsy construct the self is, and how provisional is the manner in which we lead our lives. Western individualism teaches us that we are free to remake ourselves in whichever way we chose, that we are masters of our own destiny." - Jason Cowley, The Observer
  
  
• "Although the characters in this book endure unimaginable heartbreak along with their happiness, it's sometimes hard to think that they didn't have it coming." - Max Winter, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "In its way Plateforme is a novel of ideas, even if these ideas are dubious. It would be tempting to draw a wholly redundant moral from all this; surprisingly, none seems to be available. Readers hoping for a sexual odyssey along the lines of Les Particules élémentaires will be slightly disappointed. This simply proves that like tourists everywhere they will have read the brochure, i.e. the advance publicity, and have signed up for the tour. Booksellers report a brisk turnover." - Anita Brookner, The Spectator
  
  
• "For all his faults he pulls you along by his audacity and his verve. There is something new and rare here, a genuinely unsettling wit with a terrible tang of truth. His critics will see him as a reactionary populist, a kind of literary Eminem, but he is much better than that." - George Walden, Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "(A)s shocking as its predecessor, if not more so, and just as compelling and stomach-churning. (...) And behind all the contempt, the obsessively detailed but cold-as-ice descriptions of the most amazing sexual acrobatics, there lingers a yearning for older, discredited values of love and generosity, and for a way of life that could even be described as spiritual." - Andrew Riemer, Sydney Morning Herald
  
  
• "The book is classic, gamy Houellebecq: witty, indigestible, willfully repellent and fiercely enjoyable. (...) Houellebecq has a gift for sleepy invective; he has contempt for both freedom and authority. But he's like a bad date -- brimming with rank charm but few useful judgments." - Richard Lacayo, Time
  
  
• "This is the kind of plotting that has led many English critics, seduced by Houellebecq's "honesty", to hail him as a "novelist of ideas". But Platform does not contain an "idea" to keep a mayfly awake at night, and Houellebecq is no more a novelist of ideas than Benny Hill. (...) At best, Platform might reinforce Michel Houellebecq's position as the talismanic idiot-savant of the emasculated literary right. But he is an idiot-savant who does not savoir anything." - Giles Coren, The Times
  
  
• "Houellebecq is as sharp as ever in his dissection of social groups (.....) Plateforme doesn't have the impact of Les Particules elementaires, whose originality and emotional force make it a landmark in French fiction. Houellebecq's view of society, French society in particular, remains bleak (there is an alarming description of one of Paris's satellite towns)." - Adrian Tahourdin, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "What begins as a portrait of a dulled and clotted imagination is quickly flattened by a narrative schematism that, in its hectic effort to globalize Michel's malaise, undoes the comic force of the novel's early chapters. (...) As with Atomised, Houellebecq has been ill-served by his translator (or editors); the text is peppered with infelicities." - Brian Dillon, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "What's at stake is the desacralizing of sex, its final leap into the realm of pure commodity, the role of implacable consumption in cultural imperialism, and whether it's the characters who are bored by these worthy concerns, or the novel, or just us." - Joshua Clover, The Village Voice
  
  
• "But what seems to hit the panic button, at least in America, is that Houellebecq has a genius at making you think he is on your side, that the two of you basically agree about the world and its iniquities, about what will help make things better. And then suddenly you wake up drunk, naked and committed to some repellent political notion, wondering how he got you there. Platform does this to you again and again" - Gavin McNett, The Washington Post
  
  
• "Hatte Houellebecq in den vorausgegangenen Romanen noch ab und an stilistische Brillanz gezeigt, eine Brillanz der Kälte wohlgemerkt, die an den Dandy-Duktus eines Drieu und Montherlant anzuknüpfen versuchte, Autoren also, welche die Analyse menschlicher Antriebe mit der skeptischen Schonungslosigkeit sprachlicher Puristen betrieben, so sinkt die Schnörkellosigkeit mittlerweile in die pure Banalität herab und fördert in Plattform Stammtischsätze zu Tage" - Tilman Krause, Die Welt
  
  
• "Despite Houellebecq's straightforward, almost breezy style, the problems he tackles are hardly simple or trivial. Less controversial issues may appear in the narrative, as when he discusses the state of the art world or the dangers of unfettered materialism. He proves to be especially adept at using dialogue to approach touchier issues such as corporate misconduct, sexual tourism, or Islamic fundamentalism." - Steven Daniell, World Literature Today

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:

       Platform begins with a murder. The narrator, Michel, begins his tale with the death of his father -- killed, it turns out, by the brother of the young woman who cleaned his father's house (and who was having a sexual relationship with him). The event is described in a manner making it appear almost banal, a stupid and unconvincing clash of cultures and expectations leading only to a senseless death -- albeit one that hardly touches anyone (Michel, who wasn't that close to his father, is hardly perturbed, and even at a recreation of the crime can't work himself up into anything approaching a vengeful fury). Michel expects society and justice to deal with the matter in a similarly cursory manner: "His defense was lucid and credible, he would probably come across well in front of a jury -- a two- or three-year suspended sentence, no more." (Aïcha, the student who cleaned the house and was at the root of the deadly dispute, is the harshest in her judgement, having no respect for her pseudo-Islamic brothers: "They get blind drunk on pastis and all the while they strut around pretending to be the guardians of the one true faith, and they treat me like a slut because I prefer to go out and work rather than marry some stupid bastard like them.")
       Anomie pervades the book, especially in the opening scenes. Michel is a lackluster forty year-old man, without family or real friends. He is a bureaucrat, working in the Ministry of Culture -- showing how even culture has become bureaucratized, and if not entirely crushed by state influence and controls, so at least rendered largely harmless. Michel states early on: "My conclusion, henceforth, is that art cannot change lives. At least not mine." (It should be noted, however, that Michel writes all this in the future, looking back after the events have unfolded: there likely was a point when he still believed in some transformative power for art.)
       It is not merely culture that disappoints, however: all of society seems on the verge of becoming rundown, aimless, degenerate. The "placid socialism" of this France insures a certain standard of living but is clearly fraying at the edges.
       Michel is an odd but in some ways representative cog in this machinery: comfortably ensconced in a government job (which he performs competently, if unexceptionally), but with little ambition and no particular desires (as a consumer or otherwise) that aren't easily satisfied. After work Michel usually takes in a peepshow -- almost all the personal human contact and sex he needs. He does wonder: "Why had I never shown any real passion in my life in general ?" but the world he lives in seems to allow for (or even encourage) such a dispassionate lethargy.
       After the death of his father Michel does decide to get away for a few days over Christmas (since he obviously has no one he would care to spend it with), and while he simply does head to the airport without ticket or even destination, he does opt for the predictable comforts and arrangements of a package tour ("Thai Tropic" 15 days/ 13 nights).
       Thailand offers something of a contrast, but also specifically allows for greater amplification of the what's-wrong-with-modern-Western-civilization themes, as Michel describes his fellow travellers and their reactions to these foreign circumstances. Sex -- and sex-tourism, which Michel freely indulges in -- also play a role. Sex is a central problem in the West, as Michel sees it, an issue Westerners can't properly deal with any longer:

Try as they might, they no longer feel sex as something natural. Not only are they ashamed of their own bodies, which aren't up to porn standards, but for the same reason they no longer feel attracted to the body of the other.

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Links:

• Vintage publicity page
• Vintage (UK) publicity page
• Anagrama publicity page
• Interview at The Guardian
• Article in The Observer

• Amerika
• The Asian Wall Street Journal
• BBC News
• carpe librum (German)
• Daily Telegraph
• Dissent
• Falter (German)
• Free Williamsburg
• The Guardian
• Irish Times
• January Magazine
• Kirkus Reviews
• LA Weekly
• LA Weekly
• Litteratursiden.dk (Danish)
• My Mind Bursts
• New Statesman (1)
• New Statesman (1)
• New York Press
• The New York Times
• The New York Times Book Review
• The New Yorker
• The Observer
• The Oxonian Review of Books
• Publishers Weekly
• RainTaxi
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Slate
• The Strongest of the Strange
• Sunday Telegraph
• Three Monkeys Online
• The Village Voice
• The Washington Times

• Michel Houellebecq at Guardian Unlimited
• Profile at The Observer
• On Michel Houellebecq at the crQ

• Annihilation
• The Elementary Particles (UK title: Atomised)
• Lanzarote
• The Map and the Territory
• The Possibility of an Island
• Public Enemies (with Bernard-Henri Lévy)
• Serotonin
• Submission
• Whatever

• Julian Barnes' different touristic fantasy, England, England
• 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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© 2003-2024 the complete review

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