Book review: Public Enemies

Even when practised by such greats as Christopher Lloyd and Beth Chatto (Dear Friend and Gardener) or Lyttelton and Hart-Davis, such correspondences invariably appear laboured and superfluous.

Here BHL – France’s leading public intellectual – and novelist Michel Houellebecq attempt to bond over their supposedly shared status as widely reviled public figures in France, while admitting their differences about the importance of political engagement, BHL believing it to be the intellectual’s ultimate justification, Houellebecq not giving a fig.

The bonding never really takes because BHL actually reckons he’s the tops and has been unjustly derided (see Une Imposture Francaise by Nicolas Beau and Oliver Toscer, 2006, to understand how thoroughly exposed he has in fact been).

On the other hand, nobody can say anything more damaging about Houellebecq than he says himself (unless perhaps one were to denigrate his poetry, which he does pride himself on).

Houellebecq opens this book by boldly announcing: “We have, as they say, nothing in common – except for one essential trait: we are both rather contemptible individuals.” Then he proceeds to detail in just what way they are both wretched specimens.

This isn’t BHL’s idea of himself at all and he tries to wriggle out of it. Vainly. For by the end he stands revealed as an absolutely preposterous figure, purely through his own conceited posturing. “Why do you write? Because you can’t make love all day. Why do you make love? Because you can’t write all day,” he says, in a cringe-making attempt to emphasise it is not just his shirts that make him Byronic but also his performance between the sheets.

If he chooses not to reply to his critics, he says, it’s because “they’re just not worth it”. The world would have been much the poorer had he, BHL, been any less prominent, he announces: “The Burundians, the Darfuris, the Bosnians would hardly have benefited from my return to obscurity. Look at all the good and great causes I’ve devoted myself to.”

Public Enemies can best be enjoyed if BHL’s contributions are skipped altogether, or at most rapidly skimmed over, as is likely to happen anyway, so tiresome are they.

For his part, Houellebecq is funny, surprising and inspiring. He states that he cannot be reactionary because, if there is a single idea running through all his novels, “it is the absolute irreversibility of all processes of decay once they have begun. Whether this decline concerns a friendship, a family, a larger social group, or a whole society; in my novels, there is no forgiveness, no way back, no second chance: everything that is lost is lost absolutely and for all time.”

Conservative, then, yes; reactionary, never.

He says that not only has he never felt any duty or responsibility to France but that choosing which country to live in has about as much emotional resonance for him as choosing a hotel. “We are only passing through here on earth, I understand that perfectly now; we have no roots, we bear no fruit. In short, our mode of existence is different from that of trees. That said, I’m very fond of trees, in fact I’ve come to love them more and more; but I am not a tree. We are more like stones, cast into the void.”

If he is an author, he observes, it is not because of his mastery but because of his “way of being half-present, a capacity for stupor … a neotenic weakness that makes it necessary for me, every morning, more than for others, to relearn how to live”.

Houellebecq is an original, a true spirit of the age: everything he writes is worth reading. He extricates himself from his encounter with this self-important buffoon slyly and humorously. He shouldn’t have got into it in the first place, though.

Public Enemies

by Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Lévy

Atlantic Books, 320pp, £19.99