The really shocking thing about Michel Houllebecq’s Soumission — he rather likes Islam

Michel Houellebecq’s sixth novel, imagining an Islamic government taking power in France in 2022, has been widely assumed to be an act of pure provocation. He is, after all, the author who faced legal trouble after having said in an interview in 2001: ‘La religion la plus con, c’est quand même l’islam.’

Soumission (Submission) was announced quite suddenly by Flammarion in December for the first week of the New Year, with an initial print run of 150,000 copies. So keen was the interest that it was pirated online before publication. It’s an event — but a literary event, it turns out.

For Soumission is a fine, deeply literary work, not a prank. It’s devoted just as much to the 19th-century novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (evidently its point of origin for Houellebecq) as it is to the future of Islam in Europe, offering a sustained, revealing commentary on his life and work throughout the book.