My review of Submission, published in the Tampa Bay Times:
Not with a bang, but with a ballot.
That is how France comes under Islamic rule in the near future in
French novelist Michel Houellebecq's challenging and sobering novel.
Challenging because it presents a welter of ideas, including a short
course in French literature and philosophy. Sobering not so much because
of the takeover itself but because of the Western decay — suicide,
really — that allows it to happen.
Submission serves as a warning to the comfortable and
self-satisfied West that individual liberties and secular governments
can have expiration dates. It's 2017, and the politically savvy Mohammed
Ben Abbes has formed the Muslim Brotherhood with a focus on charity,
youth groups and "family values." It takes off, and by 2022 a tipping
point arrives.
As Houellebecq's narrator says: "It may well be impossible for people
who have lived and prospered under a given social system to imagine the
point of view of those who feel it offers them nothing, and who can
contemplate its destruction without any particular dismay."
The narrator is Francois, a middle-aged Paris literature professor
with no lasting attachments, little interest in politics and a
fascination with the 19th century writer J.K. Huysmans, the subject of
his dissertation. Mired in a series of unsatisfactory relationships with
students and prostitutes, Francois may be standing in for an entire
civilization when he asks, "Should I just die? The decision struck me as
premature." He views the rise of the Brotherhood with bemused
detachment until it becomes clear that an Islamic government will
directly affect his teaching position.
Where other authors might have loaded this tale with violence and
political caricature, Houellebecq sticks to ideas and intimate
relationships. Gunshots pop, but only in the background.
In fact, the Islamic party's rise seems so effortless that it becomes
at times hard to swallow, even as fiction. Would France really submit
to women being excluded from secondary education? Or requiring
professors to convert to Islam? In the novel, women leave the workforce
in droves in favor of a generous family subsidy, driving down the
unemployment rate.
There is a kind of demographic determinism at work that can seem too
trite, as when Francois defends the patriarchal societies of old: "There
were families with children, and most of them had children. In other
words, it worked, whereas now there aren't enough children, so we're
finished."
Houellebecq's relationship with Islam is fraught. In his 2000 novel, Lanzarote,
a narrator who is looking for a place to vacation says, "Arab countries
might be worth the effort … if we could just liberate them from their
absurd religion." In Submission, Francois takes a more
accommodating approach. Houellebecq himself is quoted as saying the
novel is not Islamophobic but a social commentary.
As usual, the author's winning prose is studded with bitter wit and
imagery, as when a former lover who has aged poorly is likened to "a
bird in an oil slick" who "had retained, if I can put it this way, a
superior ability to flap her wings." When Francois leaves Paris to
escape potential unrest, he goes to the southwest. "I knew next to
nothing about the southwest, really, only that it was a region where
they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with
civil war." When he gets back to Paris, all the women are in pants.
"If Islam is not political, it is nothing," according to Ayatollah
Khomeini, who is quoted at the beginning of the novel's final section.
Where Houellebecq runs with that idea will leave many readers fascinated
and alarmed.
