Every once in a while you come across one of those novels – you know, you have twenty or thirty pages left and you sit there thinking ”okay, so how are you going to tie all this together and show me something in thirty pages?”. Usually what you get is the most common, garden variety textbook ending. But every once in a while, and this really doesn’t happen very often, you get a book that really delivers.

Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles (1998) does.

In the last flickering breath of the book in the form of an epilogue it changes the entire parameters of the novel. It brings home content, action and characters. It redefines and salts the action. It gives your head a nice spin. Throughout the novel I had moments of thinking “this is all good and well, but where is this all going?” and I am weary of that feeling, because quite often the novel just peters out in dull disappointment. Not this time.

Houellebecq writes in a heavily intellectual tradition and comparisons are often drawn to Camus, Beckett, Huxley et al. There are moments when you feel the legacy of the alienation literature, maybe in this novel especially in the description of sex. The sex scenes come across as descriptively explicit, but basically void of any emotion, any quality of excitement. They remain in the mind as descriptions of the hopelessness of physical solace in a world where there can be no real connection between individuals. It seems rare and cold and pointless until you get to that little gem of an epilogue.

The Elementary Particles is a story of two half-brothers Bruno and Michel. Bruno describes his childhood at different boarding schools where he is put through all kinds of abuse from older students and eventually grows up to be a teacher. Michel is raised by his grandmother and is a quiet introvert sort of boy who eventually becomes a molecular biologist. Both of them are failures at the whole human connection thing, but both of them meet what can be described as the love of their respective lives. Their stories do not end well. How could they? This is not that kind of novel – that is not to say that there is any great tragedy either, just life doing what it does. The irony is not lost on the characters either and at one point Michel says: “You can look at life ironically for years, maybe decades; there are people who seem to go through most of their lives seeing the funny side, but in the end, life always breaks you heart. Doesn’t matter how brave you are, or how much you’ve developed a sense of humour, you still end up with your heart broken. That’s when you stop laughing. In the end there is just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end there is only death.”

There’s a heavy strain of mortality salience throughout the entire story, but more than that and the sense that the writer knows clinical depression well, there is the sense of loss and distance that can only come from the awareness that materialism has crept into human relationships in such a way that there can never be any true sense of selfless love unless we first get rid of the materialistic individuality of our culture. Sick. Wrong. Funny at times. And beautifully done.

Read it.

Read it even if you don’t get the point until you’re on the last page. Read it even if you get a bit nauseated at times. Read it even if it makes you laugh and then choke on you laughter. It’s good for you.

Mule