Prophet of gloom

Sometimes, just occasionally, the right horse wins the race. By some miracle or mistake, VS Naipaul was awarded last year's Nobel Prize for Literature. And now Michel Houellebecq (pronounced Wellbeck) has been given the International Impac Dublin Literary Award 2002 for his novel, Atomised.

This is a truly creative use of whatever clout the prize commands. Atomised is a quite astounding novel whose influence has been growing steadily across Europe (the Impac nominations came from libraries in Germany and Norway). Michel Houellebecq has put contemporary French fiction back on the map in a way not seen since Camus.

The French literary establishment remains appalled by him, however, and he has not been granted the major literary prizes there. His third novel, Plateforme, was removed from the short list of the most important, the Prix Goncourt, last year after Houellebecq gave a supposedly offensive interview, while drunk, to the literary magazine Lire. Both Houellebecq and the magazine are now being sued by Muslim associations in France for "inciting racial hatred and religious violence".

That interview - which appeared before 11 September - does not deserve such a reaction. True, Houellebecq criticised Islam. He described having had a kind of " negative revelation" in the Sinai Desert which made him reject monotheism altogether. "In this very rocky landscape, very inspiring, I said to myself that the act of believing in a single God was the act of a cretin, I could find no other word. And the most stupid religion really is Islam." He adds that he believes Islam to be doomed, partly because it is not true, partly because it is being undermined from within by capitalism. "All that one can hope is that it will triumph quickly. Materialism is a lesser evil." Had such remarks been made about Christianity, nobody would have minded.

Houellebecq is the most scathing pessimist now writing. Some would dismiss this stance as purely personal. Born in 1958, he suffered agonies of rejection as an adolescent; he often mentions an incident in a discotheque where the girl he desired would not dance with him but with another. The tall novelist Will Self was quoted recently as saying of Houellebecq: "He's just a little guy who can't get enough sex. That's it, isn't it?" Not quite. Trusting to his own misery, he has presented us with truths about our society. It's impossible to read Atomised and not recognise that. (Seen remotely enough, maybe we're all little guys, anyway.)

Houellebecq's first novel, Extension du Domaine de la Lutte (oddly translated as Whatever) was published in 1994. The narrator who works in computers, attempts to make a sex-murderer out of a physically repellent colleague who cannot get a girlfriend. He does not succeed in his plot, but the wretched man perishes anyway. All freedoms create losers as well as winners, Houellebecq insists. The advances of the Sixties have brought misery for many in their train.

It is Houellebecq's central theme that the West is slowly committing suicide. Faith is no longer possible, but life without faith amounts to little more than a race between sex and death. The breakdown in restraint that occurred in the Sixties has made it harder to love, or even find real pleasure. "Liberty is equivalent to suffering," Houellebecq has said in interview, as simply as that.

Atomised - Houellebecq's second novel - presents this thesis with a kind of insolent precision. Michel and Bruno are half-brothers, born like Houellebecq in the late Fifties. Michel is a molecular biologist, a cold thinker, with little social or erotic life, having turned away the love he was once offered. Bruno, by contrast, is driven by lust and tries every form of promiscuity in search of satisfaction. He finds only an ever more acute awareness of ageing and loss and ends in an asylum.

Houellebecq presents these different forms of despair with pitiless clarity, making sudden switches from close observation to distant perspectives on human life, history and biology which leave the reader stunned. The novel is also remarkable for its sex scenes - in the Lire interview Houellebecq actually boasted: "I have an immodest hypothesis: I am better than others at sex scenes. Mine appear truer."

His third novel, Plateforme ( which will appear in English this autumn), was kicked off by Houellebecq's surprise at seeing Muslim Arabs enthusiastically participating in sex tourism in Thailand. He appears to endorse sex tourism as the only logical recourse for the sexually fatigued West ("If these people can no longer make love, it's because they are too much prisoners of their individuality"). But then everything Houellebecq proposes is a counsel of despair, a provocation.