Genius in the margins

"This is the best young poet in France today," he said. That very afternoon, in the Jardin de Luxembourg, Paris, I opened the first collection by Michel Houellebecq. The first title: "Hypermarket in November"; the first decasyllable: "I stumbled into a freezer." I laughed and, as I turned the pages, fell in love with his poetics and world view: a social hypermarket rife with loneliness and narcissistic competition ("Don't worry, my friends, nowhere does love exist/It's just a cruel game in which you're victims/A game for specialists"); a Baudelairean combination of contemporary spleen - ring-roads and retirement homes; suicidal obese little sisters; motorised ants in open-plan offices - and a striving for the ideal, to be "anywhere out of this world", be it through nostalgia or, more often, a sublime fusion that extinguishes the blind will of market forces ("Schopenhauer, je t'aime"). All of this drama expressed in impeccable regular verse or Biblical verses.

Smitten, yet still unable to pronounce his name properly (it's "Wellbeck"), I started translating Houellebecq and other contemporary French poets for a special issue of Lines Review, then edited by Tessa Ransford. In the summer of 1995 I obtained an audience with Michel in his flat in the deeply unfashionable 15th arrondissement of Paris. He had just published Extension du domainde de la lutte (Whatever), the tale of a disabused computer programmer. ("I hate this world. I truly do.") Cult status had arrived. He had taken unpaid leave from his job as a computer programmer in the National Assembly: he was not returning to the world of work. But his environment was still sombre, even seedy. The fridge contained little more than a bottle of cheap ros. His bathroom was adorned with a tatty poster of Snoopy: "Vive les vacances!"

He invited me to dinner at a Thai restaurant that had just opened around the corner. At the end of the meal, the hosts, taking us for a couple of lovers, offered a complimentary drink of rice wine. Beneath the transparent bases of our glasses were pictures of well-hung adolescent boys. Michel stared into space: "There are times when I find sexuality truly depressing ..."

And so began our friendship and the absorbing spectacle of one very talented, yet very vulnerable, person passing from obscurity to superstardom. I have seen "fame" bestowed on contemporaries from Galashiels Academy: John Collins at football, Gregor Townsend at rugby. But both (sympathetic) individuals were following established, peer-recognised paths. Michel Houellebecq (n Thomas) had a slightly more troubled trajectory: a broken childhood, sojourns in psychiatric clinics, endless combat with demons of drugs and drink; and an education at the Institut National d'Agronomie rather than the ultra-chic Ecole Normale Suprieure which produced such household names as Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault and Derrida.

That said, the fact that the author of The Pursuit of Happiness now sells by the lorry-load and is the most translated French writer since Albert Camus, if not of all time (36 languages), indicates that he has touched an all-too-raw nerve. In the atomised universe he evokes, where the domain of struggle has extended from economic to intimate relations, we are all at the margins.

Houellebecq did not have to leave the "margin" to be at the "centre". And Houellebecq attracts, thanks to his desire to go beyond the state of separation. Beyond the relentless shopping and f***ing, he wants to recreate the conditions for the possibility of love.

While working on the BBC documentary, The Trouble with Michel, the director snapped her fingers at me and demanded: "Sum up Houellebecq in three words!" I scoured a brain addled by too much whisky; I did not want to forfeit my fee. Finally I coughed up: "Solitude, suffering, solution."

Years previously, in a freezing flat in St Andrews, long before dawn, the phone had gone. It had to be Michel. "I need to see you. I've stopped drinking. My behaviour had become repellent."

Then he told me how, that very night, he had finished the manuscript of his new novel.

"Does it have a happy ending?" my teeth chattered.

"Yes, sort of ..."

Atomised proposed replacing mankind with a species of clones. This frightening eulogy to eugenics shot him to international stardom, riches and lawsuits.

There followed his last, uplifting collection of poems, Renaissance, a novella Lanzarote, then Platform, which proposes sex tourism as a solution to the ills of a sado-masochistic West.

Many will be familiar with the Platform controversy of 2001-2002, the death threats and lawsuits provoked by its disparaging remarks on Islam, a crisis that saw Michel's wife in psychiatric care and him seeking asylum in my cottage in Crail. But when I was with him on Bere Island, County Cork, on the eve of his taking the manuscript to Paris, his fear had been that it would cause controversy with "insulting portraits" of people in the French travel industry. There was no mention of Islam. Not for the first time, Michel Houellebecq stumbled into trouble. He was an expression of his times, but not as consciously as many believe.

Four years have passed, and Michel, accompanied by his intrepid, if sexually frustrated, Corgi, Clment ("I have failed to make contact with the Royal Family"), roam freely across their nudist colony in Almeria and along the autovias of Andalusia. Houellebecq's long-awaited fourth novel, The Possibility of an Island, has just detonated in Paris.

The 500-page tome recounts the story of an outrageous comedian, Daniel, author of films such as We prefer the Palestinian orgy sluts, Motorway Swingers and Munch on my Gaza Strip (my huge Jewish settler). Daniel observes with growing disgust (and wealth) a society obsessed with youth and contemptuous of the old, a doomed world of eternal "kids". After two failed love affairs, he commits suicide, but not before having his DNA preserved by the Elohimite Church. This sect, modelled on the Raelians, offers to fulfil the ancient religious promise of eternal life, but through the science of cloning. The life story of Daniel is intercut with the commentaries by his "neo-human" descendants, who inhabit a world devastated by nuclear war, climatic change and a shift in the Earth's axis.

The novel recycles many themes from the world of Houellebecq: solitude and suffering; sexual competition; fear of old age; cloning. At the same time, he questions the cloning solution: towards the end of the novel, neo-humans will desert their sterile sanctuaries in search of a new community, believed to be on the site of what was once Lanzarote. The desire for love and fusion remains: "There exists in the midst of time/The possiblity of an island."

The novel has been denounced as "bloated" and "boring". Vituperative pamphlets and an unauthorised biography have fed the sharks circling this particular island. Houellebecq's mother, whom he had declared dead, prepares a lawsuit. But Michel has been defended by Le Monde and by the enfant terrible of Spanish cinema, Fernando Arrabal.

What I believe makes this novel special is its virtuosity. As the English translator, I have had firsthand experience of getting to grips with its extraordinary mixture of discourses: pornographic, poetic, scientific, philosophical, a language both vulgar and flinty. In the course of translating, certain individuals have put me right on the nuances of "munch" and "graze", "fuzzy automata" and "the knowing use of Chupa Chups", cunnilingus and "the cunning of Reason".

I have also had to engage in the unusual practice of "self-translation". One scene in the novel was in fact written by myself for the aborted film version of Platform. It involves a Miss Bikini Contest on Lanzarote with east European Lolitas and a black man dressed as a circus chimp. The spectacle pushes Daniel and Vincent, the future Elohimite prophet, to definitively renounce human society: "Vincent was as out of place here as Samuel Beckett in a rap video."

The Possibility of an Island is above all an aesthetic achievement. For this, Houellebecq should win the Prix Goncourt that polemics and personalities have made so elusive. When, this week, Michel Houellebecq arrives at the Scottish Poetry Library for the first academic conference on his work, he may have the domestic recognition he craves.

On the day I received the manuscript, Michel told me: "After this novel, my life is f***ed." Maybe. But then, as the reader is told in Possibility: "Who among you deserves eternal life?"

The Possibility of an Island by Michel Houellebecq, translated by Gavin Bowd, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson at 12.99. Houellebecq will attend a conference on his work at the Scottish Poetry Library on Friday and Saturday next week, 28 and 29 October.