The seventh winner of the Impac fiction prize is a controversial choice, writes Eileen Battersby, Literary Correspondent
White smoke billowed from Dublin Castle, along with some gasps, as Frenchman Michel Houellebecq (44) was announced winner of this year's International Impac Dublin Literary Award. Atomised, a subversive satire about sexuality, relationships, society and mankind in general, is the most controversial of the seven winners to date.
As one of the judges, the British writer Michael Holroyd, speaking soon after the announcement yesterday, said with elegant understatement: "There will be those who will be disturbed and agitated; there will be some who will be shocked."
This is a novel guaranteed not only to divide readers, but to subdivide an individual reader, who may experience simultaneous feelings of love and hate. Houellebecq's vision of sex as a degrading exercise in humiliation may not be for all. With its echoes of Aldous Huxley's explicit classic, Brave New World (1932), and a subtext implying that life in the future will be one endless orgasm, it can be provocative and downright embarrassing.
Atomised is a pornographic parable based around the unhappy lives of two outsider half-brothers. Sequences of manic humour, repulsive exhibitionism and unexpected emotion on the subject of father-son relationships occur with bewildering speed.
It is clever and funny. Its selection on the strongly international shortlist endorsed the daring of the judging panel, which appeared intent on balancing the more obvious inclusion of the two most recent Booker Prize winners, Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin and Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang.
The further step which brought Atomised and its gifted translator, Frank Wynne, to the €100,000 prize confirms that fiction - and judges - are still capable of surprises. This is a good thing. Yet not to give the prize to Carey's wonderful novel seems in itself an act of wilfulness. According to Holroyd, the panel "did not want the obvious". Nor did it choose a crowd-pleasing alternative, particularly as Irish writer Michael Collins, with The Keepers of Truth, had support.
"I see the philosophy as being similar to that of Samuel Beckett," Holroyd said of Atomised, adding: "I see the writing as having the same vitality as Beckett."
Despite the emphasis placed on sex throughout the novel, and a narrative motif that could be the revenge against 1960s hedonism, the far darker theme is that of children unloved by selfish parents. Michel and Bruno, the half-brothers, are both abandoned by a mother taken up by a lifelong cult of youth.
Houellebecq's own life reads as a surreal novel. The son of a mountain guide father and an anaesthesiologist mother, both of whom, he is understood to have said, quickly lost all interest in his existence, Houellebecq was raised by his maternal grandmother, a communist. He now lives on Bere Island off the west Cork coast. Well-established as a poet, and author of two other novels, Whatever and Platform, he has already won the Grand Prix National des Lettres, while Atomised won the Prix Novembre. His hatred of Islam, voiced in an interview last summer, caused him to go into hiding. A fatwa of sorts is believed to have been placed on him. Further outrage has been incited by his positive support of the Third World sex tourism industry.
It is certainly different, but while the Impac judges are basking in their daring, their real success may be having alerted readers to the subtle eroticism and style of Polish writer Antoni Libera's Madame.
Also shortlisted were the veteran Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes, for The Years With Laura Diaz and Helen de Witt's The Last Samurai. The prize will be presented in Dublin on June 15th.
Reviews of all seven novels shortlisted for the Impac Dublin Literary Award 2002 are available on the Irish Times website at: www.ireland.com/dublin/impac/