A disjointed take on love, sex, and cloning
The Possibility of an Island, By Michel Houellebecq, Translated, from the French, by Gavin Bowd,Knopf, 337 pp., $24.95
If the technology for human cloning were available today and promised you could exist in an idealized form -- without fears or sorrow or longing, sustained by simplified joy and unmitigated sexual fulfillment -- would you reserve your place in line?
Such is the question posed in Michel Houellebecq 's new novel, ``The Possibility of an Island," a book of large ideas that attempts to explore, but fails to cohere, the unwieldy ideas of love, isolation, sexual necessity, personal expression, and technology.
Daniel is a 40-something performance artist, who's made his substantial fortune creating plays, movies, CDs, and live performances from deliberately offensive social commentary, in search of the ``allegiance between nastiness and laughter." He describes his art with a kind of bland ennui, grasping for new combinations of sensitive material to render unpleasant, and his gratuitous sexual exploits, always graphically described, are undermined by his deep sense of self-loathing.
Daniel, after all, strives to be human, and the most affecting passages in the book come when he gets to speak about himself as an emotional being. But Houellebecq won't allow this direct expression of authenticity, and breaks up Daniel's narration with short, wildly stylized chapters, told millions of years in the future, by Daniel's clones -- first Daniel24, and, when he ``expires," Daniel25 -- who read Daniel's life story and offer a kind of nonplussed commentary on their progenitor.
It's a difficult structural balance for the book to strike, mostly because the voice s of Daniel and his clones are disparate. Daniel's voice is pitiless and objectifying, particularly regarding his relationships with women -- first, with his wife, Isabelle, who is beautiful, smart, and sophisticated, and in whom he loses interest once she starts showing her age. Next is a young sex-charged Spaniard named Esther, who revives his sense of virility, but ultimately breaks his heart. Throughout all this, Daniel reveals himself to be a crass, desperate man, and one hopes for some critical jabs from his clones about their inheritor's antics, but that doesn't happen -- they're too busy reeling off spools of IP addresses, recording trite poetic mish-mash, or rambling on about the teachings of the ``Founders," the ``Supreme Sister," and ``the coming of the Future Ones."
Readers don't come to fully understand the context for this dual narration until the second half of the book, when, lovelorn and alone, Daniel drifts into the company of the Elohimites, a sexually adventurous and technologically advanced cult that promises eternal life through genetic cloning. As Daniel's involvement with the Elohimites deepens, he takes on the role of documenting its origins and growth. But his task is not fortifying enough to assuage his mounting depression, and his narrative terminates with his demise, thus leaving Daniel25 to fill in the rest of the story -- explaining how the earth met it s untimely end, how the Elohimite religion caught on throughout the world, and how Daniel's story was ``central and canonical" to ``the first generation, the new species called upon to replace man."
Unfortunately, it's hard to relate to the clone s' admiration of their founding father, as even in hindsight his character remains unsympathetic. His moments of genuine human frailty -- mostly concerning his failing physical state and mortality -- have no chance against what seems to be Houellebecq's goal to make his hero completely unlikable. And the clones, cleansed of Daniel's neuroses and fallibilities -- the things that, at least, gave him a personality -- are even less interesting. They offer no insight to or interpretation of Daniel's story, and their existence -- connected to computers, in futuristic labs --is devoid of activity, original contemplation, and satisfying interaction.
