Houellebecq’s publishers announced that his publicity tour was cancelled and the author himself went into hiding. Ever since he has been accompanied by bodyguards. Yet although the French state is helping to protect him, it has by no means thrown itself behind him. In the immediate aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks the country’s Socialist Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, chose to make an address in which he said, ‘France is not Michel Houellebecq … it is not intolerance, hatred and fear.’ Obviously – unless he had got hold of an early proof – the Prime Minister had not read the novel. Although it should be no concern of a Prime Minister even if the novel was provocative, as it happens, Submission is no mere provocation. And it is an infinitely subtler and more sophisticated book than Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints or other dystopian novels.

The life of the main character, François, is not only dry in the usual Houellebecquian way, it is also painfully in need of relief. As French culture and society decay all around him, two particular revelations stand out. The first comes as a result of his Jewish girlfriend’s choice to leave France and join her family in Israel. After a sexually athletic final meeting she asks him what he will do, especially now that the university looks as if it will close when the Muslim party comes to power. ‘I kissed her softly on the lips, and said, “There is no Israel for me.” Not a deep thought; but that’s how it was.’ In fact that is a very deep thought indeed.

But the deeper spiritual point in the novel lies precisely in François’s meditations on his scholarly interest. Houellebecq (like a lot of his literary critics) assumes that his readers will be unfamiliar with the work of Huysmans, but a significant portion will have read or at least heard of A Rebours (Against Nature), one of the central texts of late nineteenth-century French decadence. By the point at which the novel starts François is tiring of his enthusiasm for Huysmans, in the way that many academics are after their first love is overlaid by years of identical lectures and questions. But the choice of Huysmans as a constant presence in the novel is important, because as it develops, François not only rediscovers part of his passion for Huysmans but also confronts one of the central challenges of Huysmans’s life. Like many of his contemporary decadents across Europe, Huysmans ended up being received into the Roman Catholic Church. It is a journey that François tries to emulate as everything falls apart around him – while intimations and then sporadic and shocking outbursts of violence become commonplace across France.