The fact of this transition, from one culture into something else, is the greatest possible refutation of the presumptions of recent generations. Contra all the assurances and expectations, the people who came into Europe did not throw themselves into our culture and become a part of it. They brought their own cultures. And they did so at the precise moment that our own culture was at a point that it lacked the confidence to argue its own case. Indeed, it was with some relief that many Europeans welcomed such alleviation from themselves, happily changed with the times, and watered themselves down or changed completely.

DEPRESSIVE LUCIDITY

Nobody knows, of course, what comes next. It could be that this stage goes on for a very long time to come. Or it could be that it all changes and that something steps into this spiritual and cultural vacuum exceptionally swiftly. One of the reasons why Michel Houellebecq may turn out to be the emblematic writer of our age is not just that he is a chronicler and exemplar of the fullest-blown nihilism, but because he has also forcefully and persuasively suggested what may follow after it.

For Houellebecq and his characters, life is a solitary and pointless labour, devoid of interest, joy or comfort aside from the occasional – generally prostitute-acquired – blow-job. The fact that the chronicler of such an existence can have been celebrated by his peers with the Prix Goncourt among other awards is perhaps less surprising than the fact that such a writer has proved so popular. For almost two decades his books have been best-sellers in their original French and in translation. When books sell this well – especially when they are also quality, rather than pap, literature – it is because they must speak to something of our times. It may be an extreme version of our present existence, but even the bracing nature of Houellebecq’s nihilism would not be so sufficient an attraction without his readers getting at least a disgusted flicker of self-recognition.

His first major novel, Atomised (1998), laid out what became a signature scene, depicting a society and a set of lives with no purpose whatsoever. Familial relations are poisonous where they are not absent. Death, and the fear of it, fills the space that was once absorbed by the business of God. At one point the protagonist Michel takes to his bed for two weeks, and repeatedly asks himself as he stares at a radiator, ‘How long could Western civilisation continue without religion?’ No revelation comes from this, only more looking at the radiator.