The Pope of Course

The strange pleasure​ of reading Michel Houellebecq, when he’s writing well, lies in the sense of being pinned down by a veteran sniper. He’s a shrewd ideological marksman, skilled at taking cover behind one set of values so as to get a better aim on another. Empathy is routinely booby-trapped, while satire can yield little surges of feeling. He can and does create character, but every now and then there is a hint of the writer in the background, holding his breath while he calibrates his effects, making minute adjustments to the telescopic sight. Here Paul Raison, the central character of Annihilation, having learned that his father, Édouard, has had a severe stroke, reflects on the robustness which made the news come as such a shock: ‘in terms of his marital situation [a young second wife] Paul might even have envied him – he was exactly the type of senior, he reflected, who was invariably shown in advertisements for funeral insurance plans.’ You can almost hear an authorial voice murmuring, ‘Oh, you like that? You won’t like the next one so much,’ before it embarks on a consciously crass invocation of death as ‘a slut, but a middle-class slut, classy and sexy’, waiting by the hospital entrance, ready to claim its victims on the upper floors. Houellebecq’s thumb is always on the scales, but it shifts smoothly from one pan to the other.

Point-of-view writing is a flexible instrument in the hands of a master, and Paul offers his maker a wide range of opportunities. A senior functionary at the Ministry of Finance, his political allegiance as well as his professional position place him on the left, though he takes it for granted that his devout sister, Cécile, and her husband, Hervé, cast their votes the other way, for the National Rally. He is married but estranged from his wife, Prudence, their Paris flat being big enough (she’s also a civil servant) for them to lead separate lives without friction, yet the possibility of their renewing the relationship never quite goes away. The fridge is a battleground where their conflicts are acted out: ‘Over the first few weeks, Paul undertook some daring skirmishes; they were vigorously repelled. Each slice of Saint-Nectaire or pâté en croûte that he deposited in the middle of Prudence’s tofu and quinoa was returned within a few hours to its original shelf, when it was not simply thrown in the bin.’ On a rare visit to her bedroom, he sees that she is reading Anita Brookner, which, as he truthfully remarks, is ‘hardly likely to boost her morale’.

Paul is a member of the political class but has never manipulated the system for personal gain, though he admits he may be too insulated by privilege to have felt the need. Despite this, he can be misanthropic enough, embarking at one point on an aria of loathing for his own species:

The human world seemed to him to be made up of little balls of egoistic shit, unconnected and unrelated to one another, and sometimes those balls grew agitated and copulated in their own way, each in its own register, leading to the existence in turn to the existence of tiny new balls of shit … For some years, it’s true, the balls of shit had been copulating in smaller numbers, they seemed to have learned to reject one another, they were aware of their mutual stench, and disgustedly parted company; an extinction of the human race seemed imaginable in the medium term.

Paul tries to get along with his relatives but isn’t above savouring rancour. At a family gathering where the Benedictine is flowing freely he enjoys the ‘vibrations of hatred’ he feels developing. Both author and character show a certain connoisseurship of negative emotion. Though he feels disgust for Cécile’s religion, he visits the local church at Bercy after his father is taken ill, and the book’s point of view doesn’t follow him inside but waits, respectfully or otherwise, outside. (Later in the book it’s revealed that he lit two candles.)

Houellebecq enjoys making the case for extreme positions through or across his characters, and then having them voice opinions that are shocking in context simply by being uncontroversial: ‘the majority choice is sometimes the best, just as in roadside cafés it is usually best to go for the meal of the day, without engaging in passionate debates.’ That’s Paul considering his options as a voter, though the apparent absence of irony may be a double bluff. Houellebecq is something of a specialist in the slow burn, using Paul to make the case that advisers at job centres ‘are good at producing remarkable imitations of optimism, it’s what they’re paid for, they’ve probably taken drama classes, maybe clowning workshops, the psychological treatment of the unemployed had got much better over the last few years. The unemployment rate, on the other hand, had not come down.’ Sometimes, though, the effect is all fizzle and no burn, as when Paul reflects on different attitudes to the elderly: ‘solidarity between the generations remained strong in those populations, old people generally died at home, for most Maghrebis putting their parents in an institution would have meant dishonour, or at least that was what he had been able to conclude from his reading of various magazines on social issues.’ The shallow basis of Paul’s knowledge allows Houellebecq a queasy retreat from his rash endorsement of foreign cultural practices.

The knife of Houellebecq’s sardonic irony has a retractable blade. Sometimes it seems to come from a joke shop, lacking all power to cut, as in a moment of arbitrary tenderness towards the waiters at brasseries near big railway stations – witnesses to so much sadness they die young. It’s hard to separate the suavity from the provocation in a sentence like this one: ‘It was the first time that Paul had seen a hanged man, or any kind of suicide for that matter, and he had expected worse.’ Sometimes the way the sentences are constructed suggests that misdirection is an end in itself, with any yield of insight relegated to a distant second place: ‘With a father who was a judge in Versailles, with his main residence in Ville-d’Avray, a holiday home in Brittany, educated at Sainte-Geneviève, then at Sciences Po and ENA, basically there was nothing surprising about Prudence turning out asexual and vegan.’ That’s not a punchline but a pothole, turning the reader’s ankle rather than advancing the novel’s business. You would never guess that by this point Prudence has been established as a character with a real potential to change, not held back by family history to any great extent.

Paul’s judgments on his blood kin show a certain amount of lenience, but Indy, the wife of his younger brother, Aurélien, provokes an outpouring of nuanced animosity that obliges the reader to put up some resistance without altogether giving up the pleasures of complicity. Indy has a son by a donor, Aurélien being infertile (or so she says), and travelled to California for the procedure:

It was probably her parents who had paid, she herself was more tight-fisted, the kind who would have gone to Belgium or Ukraine. All of that’s fine, let’s admit it, but what could have led her, among the huge catalogue of donors placed at her disposal by the Californian biotech company whose services she had used, to choose a black donor? Presumably the desire to assert her independent spirit, her nonconformity and her anti-racism all at the same time. She had used her child as a kind of advertising billboard, a way of displaying the image that she wanted to give of herself – warm, open, a citizen of the world – while he knew her to be rather selfish, greedy and above all conformist to the highest degree.

Much of Annihilation is concerned with French electoral politics, though Houellebecq has tried to avoid excessive topicality (and the rapid obsolescence bound in with it) by setting the book in the near future, in 2026-27. This attempt at future-proofing may have been reasonably effective when the book came out in France two years ago, but Macron’s manoeuvring has put Houellebecq on the back foot along with everyone else. ‘Was the president’s mind twisted enough to come up with such a scenario?’ Mais oui! The unnamed president, unable to seek a third successive term, schemes to have a docile nominee elected in order to resume his own reign later. He settles on a television personality called Benjamin Sarfati.

The only Benjamin Sarfati that search engines locate is a cosmetic surgeon in the 17th arrondissement, but a lot of familiar figures crop up in the narrative. After coaching, Sarfati is ‘perfect’ with Alain Badiou, ‘impeccable with Greta Thunberg and frankly majestic with Zemmour’. There are sly side-swipes for the benefit of insiders, as when someone asks innocently – about the former editor of Libération – ‘Isn’t Laurent Joffrin dead?’ There’s plenty of entertainment value in policy initiatives that might have the bonus of pleasing more than one sector of the electorate, easy social reforms like the decriminalisation of soft drugs: ‘Paul remembered seeing a file on that, French soil lent itself very well to cannabis growing, better than Holland, in the Périgord in particular cannabis could prove an excellent substitute solution to the traditional cultivation of tobacco – which seemed to have become completely unacceptable’ (unacceptable it may be, but a clear majority of the characters smoke away doggedly). The president is understood to be contemplating ‘a real presidential regime: get rid of the post of prime minister, reduce the number of MPs and hold midterm elections like they do in the United States … It’s a bit post-democracy, if you like, but everybody’s doing that now.’ A consultant hesitantly suggests appropriating some of the opposition’s policies, only to be told that it won’t work – their policies are the same as ours.

In the world of high politics Paul is a privileged spectator rather than a player, but while he isn’t exactly a family man he can’t easily claim the status of onlooker in that area. His mother’s death, though eight years in the past, is announced with an abruptness suitable to the event: ‘Suzanne had fallen from scaffolding while restoring a group of angels decorating a tower in Amiens cathedral,’ having forgotten to adjust her safety harness. Édouard’s new partner, Madeleine, is devoted and adoring, but not possessive. In fact the shift in family relations over the course of the novel may have less to do with Paul’s understanding of his father’s mortality (Édouard’s mental faculties seem unimpaired, but by the end of the book he still hasn’t regained the power of speech) than with his witnessing the way the women in the family adjust their lives without fuss to look after the patriarch. Cécile and Hervé move in with Madeleine, who nurses Édouard herself as long as the care centre allows her to. Cécile and Madeleine are able to overcome or ignore any tension there might be between daughter and father’s partner – a partner, moreover, who came into Édouard’s life as his home help – and Prudence surprises Paul by seeming to have real concern for her father-in-law, however little she feels, at the beginning of the book, for her husband. It’s as if family ties were not a conspiracy of compulsory misery after all, but the bedrock of civil society as dull people have always claimed, and in accordance with one of Annihilation’s less memorable aphorisms: ‘It’s always better in the end for things to correspond with their image.’

Édouard had an illustrious career in the DGSI (the General Directorate of Internal Security), and it’s not clear that Paul has ever stepped out of his shadow. Even now that Édouard can’t communicate directly, Paul wonders whether his father, far from being impaired, hasn’t simply risen above petty concerns, escaping from the labyrinth of human emotion to reach a state of pure perception. Paul opens his heart to his barely responsive father, confessing for instance that he regrets not having children – something that he didn’t know himself until he began to speak.

He had never spoken so intimately to his father when he was in full possession of his faculties, and he had been sorry about it at many times in his life. He had tried, but he simply hadn’t succeeded. With his face frozen in a priestly expression, his eyes staring at an indeterminate point in space, his father no longer belonged entirely to humanity, there was definitely something spectral about him, but also something oracular.

As the tectonic plates of family shift, Aurélien sees a chance of happiness and an escape from Indy, whom he met when she was a young journalist (‘in so far as a journalist can be young’, another failed bon mot). He starts dating Maryse, part of the nursing team looking after his father. A less worshipful translator than Shaun Whiteside would have corrected an obvious error in the original text: ‘As he undressed he found Maryse’s mobile phone in one of his jeans pockets. He had asked her for it that same morning, just before leaving the hospital.’ A nurse who gives the son of a patient her phone number has a trusting nature. A nurse who gives him her phone is having a breakdown. Houellebecq’s handling of the character of Maryse, an immigrant from Benin, is painfully awkward. Sometimes her function is merely to explain structural weaknesses in the French health system:

The problem is that on the wards there are fifteen nurses and care assistants for forty patients. At the PEoLC [Palliative and End of Life Care centre] there are twenty-five of them for two hundred and ten residents. So it might seem paradoxical for a trade union delegate to try and harm us; but the fact is that they earn the national average wage, and we’re the privileged ones.

She also has a part to play in the family drama, but it’s hard to swallow the abrupt mellowing of Hervé, in conversation with Aurélien:

‘And do you love her, that little one, Maryse?’ he asked at last.
‘Yes … I think so. I’m sure of it, in fact.’
He nodded; that was the answer he was expecting, and he added calmly: ‘Hang on to her. I think she’s OK, that girl.’

This degree of acceptance of a whirlwind romance would be rapid in any family. Coming from a National Rally voter and former member of the Identitarian Bloc it’s simply fantastical. The essential decency of the bigot isn’t a theme Houellebecq can bring off, certainly at such short notice.

By this stage​ of the novel the point of view has moved erratically away from Paul. Sometimes there seems no good reason for this shift, or drift, especially when Paul is in the room, as is the case when his boss, Bruno Juge, the finance minister, is taken in hand by a new communications director: ‘Bruno noted with a little start that she had switched to addressing him with the familiar tu, probably involuntarily.’ This moment would if anything be enriched by passing through Paul’s consciousness, divided as he might be between loyalty to a boss he admires and awareness of the ironies – this political grandee wanting to be seen as a man of the people, but so accustomed to deference that he is brought up short by the informal approach of the very person who is teaching him to play the egalitarian game.

It’s a different matter when Paul isn’t present, though the result is undoubtedly a loss of coherence in the book as a whole. If Paul is not the controlling consciousness then there can be no possible reason to narrate his dreams and no one else’s. It’s not that I want to learn about the other characters’ dreams – God forbid – but Paul’s very literary dreams, meticulous and almost machine-tooled performances of phantasmagoria, take up ten whole pages of the book.

If Paul had ever thought that his rupture with Prudence might one day be healed we’re not told about it – though perhaps it was in his mind when he lit those two candles – but the larger shift in the balance of the family draws his attention back to her. This is the substance of the middle section of the book and an honourable subject for fiction, though one that could have been explored at any time over the last century or so. In this context irony, increasingly out of key with the new mood, becomes a mental habit that has lost its raison d’être. It’s early days for Paul and Prudence, but the universe seems to side with the rekindling of their affection for each other: ‘It was still very vague but there was a feeling that springtime was beginning, the air was mild and there was a smell of vegetation, the leaves were shedding their winter protection with calm immodesty; they were displaying their tender zones, and those young leaves were taking a risk, a sudden frost could annihilate them at any moment.’ Even in the long history of the pathetic fallacy it’s unusual to have nature fall so perfectly in step with human emotion. The appearance of the title word in this sentence (anéantir in the original, an infinitive rather than an abstract noun) suggests that it has a certain centrality, roughly halfway through the book, though the mood is hopeful if uncertain. The movement here is away from nothingness rather than towards it.

The larger architecture of Annihilation is altogether odd. The book starts in the manner of a techno-thriller, and an exciting one. Cryptic posts displaying a strange design and a message in an unknown script have appeared on the internet, resisting all the efforts of the government lexicology lab (I really want there to be such a thing) to decode it. The design and the message are even reproduced on the back of the title page – the image resembles a child’s drawing of a flattened turtle, while the script isn’t far removed from a toddler’s scrawl. Click on the message and a clip plays, of a realism and high definition beyond the understanding of experts in computer-generated imagery. As one of them explains:

what really intrigues me is that you can enlarge the image as much as you want, and the synthetic blades of grass still look like real blades of grass, and normally that’s impossible to do. No two blades of grass are identical in nature; they all have irregularities, little flaws, a specific genetic signature … It’s extraordinary, it’s a crazy piece of work.

The senders of the clip make no demands, but the next one is even more technologically sophisticated, and the accumulating sequence of messages begins to correlate with interventions in the real world – a cargo ship sunk, a sperm bank burned down. First there are no casualties from these actions, then a few, then many, but the underlying rationale behind them, and the purpose of the messages, remains mysterious. Houellebecq, a child of the 1950s, has made a real effort to compete on equal terms with a thriller writer like Franck Thilliez, born in 1973. There’s a faint echo here of Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, with the possibility that our species is being given tests by an alien intelligence, for reasons that can only be guessed. Human agency seems more likely, though – it’s just that the chosen targets suggest incompatible ideologies. The attack on the sperm bank makes Paul reconsider his assumptions, forcing him to move from ‘a classic ultra-leftist trail to a much more unlikely fundamentalist Catholic one’. Satanism being added to the brew is disconcerting, but after all fundamentalist Catholics and Satanists are ‘in the same general ballpark’.

Paul becomes involved because the second clip simulates the guillotining of his boss, Bruno. As a digital technician explains, after enlarging the image of the decapitated torso at the moment blood spurts from the carotid artery, ‘Normally, if you enlarge something enough you start to see geometrical regularities appearing, artificial micro-figures – most of the time you can even guess the equation the guy used. Here there’s nothing at all; you can enlarge it all you like, it remains chaotic and irregular, exactly like a real cut.’ Houellebecq includes a diagram of the guillotine, with its component parts labelled (mouton, lunette lock), not because it plays a part later in the narrative – it doesn’t – but, at a guess, for instructional purposes.

He is proud of the trouble he has taken to get such details right, and his chronic need to be insufferable, mainly muted over the course of the novel, rings out loud and clear in the end matter, where he offers an utterly patronising invitation to his fellow writers to meet him on the high ground of conscientious research: ‘Essentially, French writers should be less reluctant to gather information; many people love their work, and enjoy explaining it to the uninitiated.’ He has certainly made the effort to inform himself about areas of experience that it might be his instinct to dismiss. Here Paul’s nephew Godefroy, Indy’s child, answers questions about the video game he is playing online, Ragnarok:

‘Is that a Scandinavian game?’
‘No. Korean.’
‘And what does it consist of?’
‘Oh, it’s very classical. I have to kill monsters to collect experience points, that lets me rise through job levels and change class. But it’s a good game, it’s well designed, very fluid.’
‘And what class are you now?’
‘Paladin,’ the boy said modestly. ‘But I’m not far off becoming a Rune Knight, at least that’s what I hope.’

This is a trick of Philip Roth’s also, to work up a moment of sympathetic engagement in order to lend the impression of balance to a venomous portrait. Houellebecq’s competitors, smarting under the suggestion that no French author before him did any research, can console themselves by seeing him fall flat on his face, as he does in a passage about the work life of Prudence’s sister: ‘it seemed to involve logos, emojis, and ideas of different Asian languages. Her job might have been difficult to define for an outsider, but it was still extremely lucrative: it was she, for example, who had designed the new Nike logo, a difficult replacement given the fame of the previous one, and who had chosen the lettering and typography of the slogans printed on Apple T-shirts.’ You don’t have to be an expert in the field to recognise this as a ludicrous CV – being alive in the 21st century is almost enough. It would be nice to think that someone answering Houellebecq’s research questions was pulling his leg.

Well researched or not, the book’s thriller plot comes to nothing, not so much botched as abandoned. The dramas in the Raison family hog the stage, and Houellebecq knows his craft well enough to make them chewy and nutritious, not to mention wry, sour and droll by turns. It’s still an eccentric piece of planning to start the meal with red meat and then follow it with bowl after bowl of muesli. It’s fine to despise genre fiction – just don’t import its tropes without putting them to good use or showing them the proper respect.

The frustration for the reader of Annihilation, as the tension leaks away, is that there is a direct link between the genre plot and the family drama. On his retirement Édouard took some old files with him. Nothing classified, of course, but Paul is asked by the intelligence services to look them out, on the off-chance that they might throw some light on the mysterious terrorists. They’re easy to locate, but he leaves the ‘five anodyne-looking cardboard folders’ where they are. Madeleine takes them to the care facility where Édouard is being looked after, so that he can be surrounded with familiar things. Only much later does Paul casually take a peek, and finds that Édouard has indeed made a promising connection. By this time more than 150 pages have passed since the first mention of the files. That’s 150 pages of narrative slow puncture.

The thriller plot gets an abrupt reprieve, but not for long. It breaks off, brought to a sort of Act I curtain, with the bad guys temporarily thwarted but no suspects, means or motive established. The book still has a good hundred pages to go. What’s so frustrating about this is that Houellebecq, when he can be bothered, understands the divergent conventions perfectly well. Paul may agree with Bruno in regarding Europe as a pathetic dependency of America, ‘a distant, ageing, depressive and slightly ludicrous province’, but genre brings its own set of assumptions. The novel’s aborted thriller plot carries a modest charge of chauvinism, and the French intelligence services duly steal a march on their counterparts in the NSA, thanks largely to a discovery made by Paul’s father before the group (whatever it is) expressed itself in action.

As long as a doomsday plot seemed to be the novel’s centre of gravity then its title didn’t seem overpitched, even if, as Paul sees it, ‘the worst thing was that if the terrorists’ goal was to annihilate the world as he knew it, to annihilate the modern world, he couldn’t entirely blame them.’ A gadfly like Houellebecq doesn’t want the cow dead, just maddened while he feeds from it. Take away the universal threat and what remains is a constitutional pessimism with its own smugness: ‘it seemed to Paul that the whole system was going to come crashing down, even if at present one could not predict the date or the manner in which this might occur – but the date could be close, and the manner violent.’ In the passage about balls of shit copulating less and less over time, it seemed to be population collapse that threatens to bring about human extinction ‘in the medium term’. How far is this from après moi, le déluge?

Other French​ novelists writing today have been less coy about confronting last things. Paolo, the hero of Boualem Sansal’s Vivre: le compte à rebours, has a prophetic dream revealing that the world will end in 780 days’ time.1 Others have received the same vision, and these chosen ones will be rescued – the question is how to prevent anyone else from jumping the queue. To me it seemed a thought experiment that didn’t reach the status of a fully fleshed novel (no mean feat unless your name is José Saramago), and I gave up before the hundred-page mark. Valérie Tong Cuong’s Voltiges, also published this year, is much more resourceful.2 This is a family saga of sorts, unfolding at a leisurely pace and with a rich psychology, but stripped of any reference to period, so that it could almost be taking place in the 19th century. The reader registers jarring details almost subliminally – the few strips of smoked fish that constitute a lavish birthday present, now that the rivers have all but dried up. There are some recognisable threats, such as extreme weather events, but others (strange creatures appearing) have an edge of fantasy. It’s a shock when the point of view shifts from the parents to the daughter, Leni, a talented and perhaps world-class tumbler. She has no expectations of the durability of the world around her, and her obsession with training represents nothing more than her desire to keep her body and mind occupied while she waits for everything to end.

That is more or less the attitude of Arthur and Kevin, the heroes of Gaspard Koenig’s masterly Humus (2023), who become friends at one of the less fêted of France’s grandes écoles, AgroParisTech.3 They are both energised by a presentation about the vital importance of earthworms to the survival of the soil, and therefore of humanity, but translate their passion into action very differently. Arthur moves to Basse-Normandie and sets himself to bring his grandfather’s land, depleted if not destroyed by decades of pesticides and fertiliser, back to worm-abounding life, while Kevin starts a business selling ‘vermicompostage’ kits to digest household waste. He struggles to build a client base, since the eco-conscious are as lazy as anyone else. But then L’Oréal funds the establishment of a giant centre of vermicompostage, so as to do their bit for their image – I’m sorry, I meant to say for the planet. Both characters’ trajectories are taken plausibly into the near future, with Kevin becoming a hero of green entrepreneurship (at least until rats mistake the vermicompostage centre for a giant invertebrate buffet), while Arthur joins the local cell of a radical armed splinter group of Extinction Rebellion intent on overthrowing the state. The construction of the book is exemplary, and the thriller plot, starting relatively late on, is seen through to the end. It helps that Koenig is less in thrall to worldliness than Houellebecq, for whom a sentence containing the words ‘the pope of course, he’s in, he called back in five minutes’ never quite loses its magic.

With doomsday shelved, Annihilation focuses even more tightly, not just on the Raison family but on the couple, both reborn and threatened, of Paul and Prudence. ‘Delamination’ might be a better title for the novel, to describe the frustrating way its various layers peel away from one another. Towards the end of the book Houellebecq seems to lose all sense of what material belongs in the narrative and what doesn’t. It’s good manners that he should acknowledge Le Maitron, a web dictionary of the labour movement, for the biography of Marcel Grosménil, politically active in Villejuif in the 1930s, but what business does he have including it, with the lightest tweaks of phrasing, just because Paul happens to be driving through the area?

If Houellebecq had wanted to write a novel about the redemptive power of married love, about the return of intimacy and sensual pleasure to a couple who have lost faith in those things, then there was nothing stopping him, apart from his track record and his persona as a writer. In fact there’s something almost valiant about his determination to be disgraceful even when dealing with such wholesome subject matter. Before making a physical approach to Prudence, Paul needs to visit a sex worker. It’s no more than politeness on his part, making sure everything is in good order so that he can approach the resumption of marital activity in the right relaxed frame of mind. The sex worker turns out to be a blood relation – but that’s all right too. She’s good at her job, and that’s the main thing. There’s no harm done, and everything works out in the end.

Perhaps this practice session brought real benefit. Certainly Prudence, described earlier in the novel as frigid and vegan, changes her ways in both domains of appetite, worrying that she might have overdone the cloves in her boeuf en daube and turning into something of a virtuoso – ‘she was really controlling her pussy brilliantly’ – of the bedroom arts. Her tenderness overwhelms Paul: ‘she turned around several times to give him little waves, and for no apparent reason her outline was increasingly blurred; perhaps he had a problem with his eyesight, on top of everything else.’ Or else (do you think?) he’s seeing things clearly for the first time. After all, ‘the entity made up by a couple, and more precisely by a heterosexual couple, remains the main practical possibility for the manifestation of love.’

It’s hard to see the point of the minor provocations that Houellebecq insists on including, given that the book’s embrace of the majority choice has become so habitual. Dying is easier for women – of course it is! It’s biological common sense: ‘women identify easily with their function and easily come to understand that when their function is at an end their life itself is over.’ There’s no explicit reference to the menopause, but I’m not sure there needs to be. Houellebecq seems unable to stop himself.

In Paul’s eyes there was little difference between the missionary position and doggy style, in both cases it was the man who controlled the rhythm and the brutality of the embrace. In both cases the woman – either by parting her thighs or lifting her bottom – placed herself in a position of submission, which was an argument strongly in favour of those positions but also … constituted their limit.

Why would a man who prefers a sexual position suggestive of equality (the couple lying on their sides) so jarringly endorse the desirability of female submission? Force of habit on the part of the author seems the most likely explanation. And is that word ‘brutality’ supposed to slip by unnoticed? Intensity by all means, fierceness perhaps, but brutality sings a different song. These little jabs at a status quo that is no longer being contested are no substitute for a coherent novelistic strategy.