In the middle of what is described as ‘depressive lucidity’ there are – apart from sex – no moments of pleasure. Christine, with whom Bruno has been having a halting, meaningless conversation, interrupts a silence by suggesting they go to an orgy on a nudist beach. The philosophical state of their culture has washed across them and submerged them under in its own pointlessness. At one stage we read, ‘In the midst of the suicide of the West, it was clear that they had no chance.’ Although the joys of consumerism are certainly not enough, they can prove diverting. As Bruno is meant to be arranging for the burial or cremation of his mother’s body he plays Tetris on his Gameboy. ‘Game over,’ it says and plays ‘a cheerful little tune’.

While the themes and characters of Atomised are repeated in Platform (first published in English in 2002), they also find something to centre on. Again, graphic sex, repetitions and variations of the same, are the only light in the gloom. Valerie, a woman who is willing to do absolutely anything sexually with the main character, Michel, is a good find and a source for hope. Even so, the genitals, it is made clear, are ‘meagre compensation’ for the misfortune, shortness and pointlessness of life. However, in Platform another world view imposes itself on Houellebecq’s characters.

Having given up his job as a civil servant, Michel takes Valerie on holiday to Thailand. He loathes the decadence of the tourism and the people who take part in it even whilst taking part in it himself. One day Islamist terrorists – who also loathe the decadence on show but have a view of their own on what to do about it – storm the beach and massacre many tourists, including Valerie. After the 2002 Bali terrorist attacks this particular scenario was seen to have been prescient. But whatever respect Houellebecq might have garnered from this was mitigated by the trouble the book helped get him into in France. After the massacre his contempt for Islam builds to a paragraph in which he reflects:

It is certainly possible to remain alive animated simply by a desire for vengeance; many people have lived that way. Islam had wrecked my life, and Islam was certainly something which I could hate; in the days that followed, I devoted myself to trying to feel hatred for Muslims. I was quite good at it, and I started to follow the international news again. Every time I heard that a Palestinian terrorist, or a Palestinian child or a pregnant Palestinian woman had been gunned down in the Gaza Strip, I felt a quiver of enthusiasm at the thought that it meant one less Muslim. Yes, it was possible to live like this.