Houellebecq’s Soumission gives us a vision of Islam tailored for Western fantasies

In an interview that aired on French television the day before the Charlie Hebdo attack last week, Michel Houellebecq was asked whether his latest novel was a belated Christmas present for Marine Le Pen. Soumission imagines a future in which the Muslim Brotherhood party rules France in a coalition with the Socialists. The Socialist Party unites with the Muslim Brotherhood and, nominally, saves France from Marine Le Pen. The centre-Left versus centre-Right dynamic that has characterised the republic since time immemorial is shattered, and Jews flee the city for Israel in fear.

François welcomes the rise of the far right only because the "long-lost frisson of fascism" makes the debates more interesting, though he devotes more attention to the breakdown of his microwave during the broadcast than to the political candidates themselves ("I ended up having to cook my Indian dinners on the stove").

There were yesterday's rallies in Germany to talk about, some in sympathy with France's anti-immigrant National Front, but also the publication of the sixth novel by notorious anti-Muslim provocateur Michel Houellebecq, out today.

Houellebecq's novel describes an alliance between a decadent consumer society where pleasure is permitted but which has lost the capacity to experience it, his version of Islam fantasised, based on the return of patriarchy and orientalist pleasure.

And so to begin to speak of other art practices where the subject disappears in the process, I wanted to think of how this position of creation and decay that you reference as well as potential renewal also reminds me of how artists and in particular the architect and writer, Lebbeus Woods, strived to think his relation to the present decay he bore witness to.

I don't want to tell you how Platform finishes, because then I'd have to say it out loud, but suffice to know that the world Michel inherits would make Schopenhauer cry. After Platform, there's the blue-collar government worker of Eugene Marten's Firework (dystopian on an individual, not the state, level, but still), and the powerless bureaucrats of George Saunders stories.