Submission by Michel Houellebecq review – satire that’s more subtle than it seems

Michel Houellebecq’s real targets in this near dystopian future are France’s bloated institutions and venal politicians

A few hours after Michel Houellebecq’s Submission was released in France, gunmen stormed into the office of Charlie Hebdo and murdered 12 people, including eight journalists. Among the victims was the economist Bernard Maris, one of Houellebecq’s closest friends. The cover of Charlie Hebdo that week showed a grotesque and lecherous Houllebecq predicting that in 2022 (when Submission is set) he’d observe Ramadan. 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 both a more subtle and less immediately scandalous satire than the brouhaha surrounding it might suggest. Rather than being a dark vision of a world ruled by mad mullahs, it presents the moderate Muslims who take over France as a force of spiritual integrity and revolutionary verve, “a historic opportunity for the moral and familial rearmament of Europe”; the real targets of the book are France’s bloated institutions, its venal politicians, its sclerotic literary scene. In Public Enemies, his exchange of letters with philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy, Houellebecq describes himself as “Nihilist, reactionary, cynic, racist, shameless misogynist… an unremarkable author with no style.” As is the case in his earlier novels, particularly the Prix Goncourt-winning The Map and the Territory (in which a fictional author named Michel Houellebecq is murdered), the target of Submission, more than anyone else, appears to be Houellebecq himself.

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