by Gavin Ashenden on Substack (Image: Pixabay)
When a civilisation loses its faith and silences its writers and thinkers, how can it defend itself?
A novel and a dark coincidence
I find it difficult to describe the impact that Michel Houellebecq’s book Submission had on me when I read it first.
Some of you may remember the day of its publication, which was the 7th of January 2015.
By lunchtime on that day, by ‘coincidence’, the Kouachi brothers, Saïd and Chérif, French-born Islamist terrorists of Algerian parentage had carried out the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January 2015, killing twelve people.
They claimed to be acting on behalf of al-Qaeda in Yemen, in retaliation for the magazine’s cartoons of Muhammad.
As it happened, that week’s issue carried Houellebecq himself on its cover, mocking him as a fairground seer.
Few novels have been launched into such a dark coincidence, and inevitably it alerted anyone with any awareness to the relevance both of Houellebecq as author and of Submission in the public mind.
It was almost as if everything the novel was warning was acted out on the morning of its publication in Paris itself.
We’ll come back to Michel Houellebecq because he has been prosecuted for hate crime against Islam, but it’s important to set this thing in a wider context, which, for my readers, is going to begin with Hilaire Belloc, another novelist, intellectual and, as it turns out, prophet.