The Chemistry Between Us

Michel Houellebecq, Atomised, 1998
Reading this novel is the equivalent of finding yourself playing an American backpacker in the movie Hostel, with Dolly the Sheep your only salvation from the torture factory. Hundreds of pages of horrifying, tortuous, bleak, sad, pessimistic, depressing fiction (interspersed with a few glimpses of a palpitating heart) culminate in one glimmer of hope.

The novel is about two half-brothers and their different quests for an understanding of love and an escape from modern life's Nihilism. In between the pornography and misanthropy there are meditations on the history of Western Civilization thought, with the sharpest barbs reserved for organised religion and devouts of the Sadean school of living.

As far as I know, Houellebecq's hatred for Islam first rears its head in Atomised. Years later, charges were brought against him for insighting racial hatred in his novel Platform. A court of law found him non-guilty. All I can say, based on Atomised, is that it's a work of fiction and if we are going to start judging every author by what their characters say, we might as well throw Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice or C.J. Lines' Filth Kiss into the bonfire. After all, the character that calls Islam "stupid" in Atomised happens to be one of the saddest, most desperate human beings in the history of literature.