Fiction: Who would think of setting a literary novel in Lanzarote? Only Michel Houellebecq, perhaps - the man who has made a career out of thumbing his nose at the French literary establishment, to the extent of decamping to live in Ireland, mon Dieu. Arminta Wallace reviews Lanzarote by Michel Houellebecq.
It is an inspired choice of subject, not least because it provides the latest in a series of succinct and startling English titles (Whatever, Atomised, Platform); Lanzarote is also, thanks to the inclusion of a number of striking abstract photographs of the semi-desert landscape, an attractive little book.
The opening scene, a gloriously observed spat between a pushy young travel agent and our unnamed narrator - who thinks of himself as a cool dude with the world at his feet, though in fact he's a cranky git, weighed down by way more than his fair share of cultural, racial and sexual baggage - is a hoot. A series of sardonic setpieces see him settle into his hotel in the unpromising company of Pam and Barbara, a German lesbian couple, and Rudi, a Belgian policeman, and keep up a cantankerous running commentary on the sun-sand-sex trade, culture and the lack of it, etc. Which is actually, of course, the latest instalment of Houellebecq's chosen critique of the human condition - humanity's mistaken search for long-term satisfaction through instant gratification.
Shock tactics, particularly in the form of quasi-racist rants and revealing sex scenes, are a feature of Houellebecq's work, and the German lesbians - more kindly, in truth, than kinky - serve their purpose here with stereotypically Prussian efficiency. But it's hard to avoid the soupçon that his fourth novel reveals something more shocking still: Houellebecq on autopilot.
The Lanzarote bits are terrific: the narrator's excursions to the island's pathetic "attractions" are so sardonically done that you can feel yourself deflate as you read them, and his feel for the arid landscape and equally arid history will resonate with anybody who has a sneaking fondness for the "real" Canary Islands: "In front of us a huge fissure, several metres wide, snaked as far as the horizon, cutting through the grey surface of the earth's crust. The silence was absolute. This, I thought, is what the world will look like when it dies."
But in a book that is so very short, there is too little of that, and too much poking of stiff and increasingly tedious "fun" at predictable targets: the hermetic French poets, cocktails, Norwegians. Norwegians? Maybe Mr Houellebecq needs a holiday . . .
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
Lanzarote. By Michel Houellebecq. Translated by Frank Wynne, Heinemann, 112pp, £9.99