Houellebecq's eerie prescience
"Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically," begins Michel Houellebecq's novel Platform. Having written last Friday about the trials in France of Houellebecq and Oriana Fallaci, I didn't think that I'd be returning the case for a while, but the mass murder in Bali on Saturday night should serve to remind us how eerily prescient Houellebecq's pre-11 September novel really was.
The main character in Platform, Michel, is a civil servant who works for the Ministry of Culture in Paris. Bored, amoral and approaching middle age he has given up on life. But when his hated father dies, leaving him money, Michel travels to Thailand, where he experiments with prostitutes and meets Valerie, who works in the tourist industry. Michel comes to believe that Asian sex tourism is the antidote to Western apathy so, with Valerie's support, he establishes a sex-tour company, Eldorador Aphrodite. Valerie's bosses are delighted to turn their ailing Club Med-style resorts into brothels as the flesh trade means "no more salaries to be paid to registered pediatric nurses or windsurfing instructors; nor to specialists in ikebana, ceramics or painting on silk".
The vision is destroyed, however, by the intervention of militants acting in the name of Islam, that "inhuman murderous absurdity", as one character calls it, who launch a devastating terrorist attack on Eldorador Aphrodite. As mutilated foreigners lie in the wreckage of the bombed club, Michel hears "the genuine screams of the damned".
That Saturday night's victims were mostly young men and women enjoying themselves in a Bali disco adds to the monstrousness of the crime committed by those acting in pursuit of their perverse ideology. Houellebecq, a disillusioned former communist, believes that all plans to remake the world for the better are doomed to failure. So what does life mean? In Platform he answers: to live in this world is to suffer.
