[In the following review, Madar commends the disturbing realism, dark humor, and occasional tenderness of Atomised.]

Published in France two years ago as Les Particules élémentaires, [Atomised] won the Prix Novembre, and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies throughout Europe; it has also provoked charges of nearly every prejudice imaginable and fervid denunciations from readers across several generations.

Atomised tells the story of two half-brothers, each an exemplary loser: Bruno, a high school teacher, is an undersexed hedonist, while Michel is a brilliant but emotionally desiccated biochemist. Abandoned by their hippie mother when they were small, neither has ever properly recovered; all their attempts at the pursuit of happiness, whether through marriage, the study of philosophy or the consumption of pornography, merely lead to loneliness and frustration. This despair is meant to characterize not just post-war French society, but the human race in general; at the end of the novel we learn that a breed of genetically modified humanoids, designed by Michel, has supplanted a terminally unhappy human race.

As this indicates, Atomised is an ambitious novel of ideas, in which the characters casually comment on the decline of religion, the rise of consumerism and, most prominently, the corrosive effects of liberal individualism. What makes this tolerable, irresistible in fact, is the author's supreme talent for illustrating his Left-conservative message with vivid scenes from a wide range of social milieus. Michel Houellebecq has clearly done a considerable amount of research in order to realize his brutally realistic settings: the sterile habitat of scientific researchers, a New Age camp site for greying soixante-huitards, a naturist beach resort, a classroom full of inattentive teenagers who are supposed to be studying Proust. And the frequent scenes of bad sex between forty-somethings make for excruciating reading. While this masochistic naturalism is often surprisingly funny, it is also periodically relieved by moments of tenderness.

Atomised (the French edition of which was reviewed in the TLS, January 15, 1999) is an engrossing and inventive novel, moving briskly from lyricism to cold-eyed reportage, from Buddhist prayers to theories on DNA replication. The translator Frank Wynne handles these clashing linguistic registers with grace and authority. Although he has starched out some of the original's colloquialisms, he has still managed to preserve the novel's urgent, confessional tone.