Submission

Changing Times

It’s surprising that French author Michel Houellebecq wrote a novel like Submission in these communally fraught times. According to reports, a little after the French original was released, the attack on the office of Charlie Hedbo took place, that resulted in the murder of twelve people. Laurent Joffrin, editor of Libération, wrote that Submission “will mark the date in history when the ideas of the far right made a grand return to serious French literature,” and armed guards were placed at the offices of Houellebecq’s publishers.

Submission is set in 2022, and seen through the eyes of forty-four year old François, a lecturer at the New Sorbonne University and an expert on nineteenth-century author J. K. Huysmans. Francois is bored with his solitary, aimless life of routine teaching and casual seductions.

It’s election season and the political grapevine issues dire warnings. The Jewish parents of his current lover, furtively move to Israel. Then, much to the shock of the French liberal intellectuals, in an alliance with the Socialists, an Islamic party sweeps to power, with the seemingly moderate Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Ben Abbes, taking over reins of the country. Islamic law comes into force, women are veiled and pushed out of the job market. Polygamy is encouraged and generous inducements – money and multiple wives—offered to academics who convert to Islam.

The novel is both satirical and cautionary, targeting with sharp barbs both the politically naïve French natives as well as a Muslim leader with ambitions of creating a unified Europe to include Islamic countries like Morocco, Turkey and Tunisia and later Lebanon and Egypt.  Francois, with his physical ailments and religious confusion, is just a pathetic gnat amidst this huge historical upheaval.

The book could be a contender for the bad sex award, but otherwise it an absorbing and discomfiting read. Mainly because it could prove to be prophetic.

Submission

By Michel Houellebecq

(Translated from the French by Lorin Stein)

Published by William Heinemann

Pages: 320