strips it instantly of all dignity.” After years of striving to provoke laughter from his audiences, Daniel opts to retire from stage and screen; Isabelle gives notice to her publisher, and the two of them depart for Spain. Within a few weeks, Isabelle, sensing the effects of advancing age upon her own body and looks, begins to lose interest in sex, and will perform the act only with her eyes closed. Echoing Jean-Paul Sartre, Daniel then observes, “When sexuality disappears, it’s the body of the other that appears, as a vaguely hostile presence; the sounds, movements, and smells; even the presence of the body that you can no longer touch, nor sanctify through touch, becomes gradually oppressive; all this, unfortunately, is well known.” It is not long before Daniel watches as Isabelle approaches a pack of stray dogs, then a frequent sight in Spain:The dogs, however, watched her approach without aggression or fear. A little white-and-ginger mongrel, with pointed ears, aged about three months at most, began to creep toward her. She stooped, took it in her arms, and returned to the car. This is how Fox entered our lives; and, with him, unconditional love.

In time, Daniel and Isabelle will separate, alternating custody of the dog, who turns out not to be a mongrel at all but rather a Welsh Pembroke corgi, the breed favored, as Daniel notes, by the British royal family. From that point forward, the dog emerges as a creature infinitely superior to humankind in its current sorry state, the state that Daniel has spent decades lampooning from stage and screen. The dog, at least, can experience happiness.

It is while walking Fox that Daniel makes the acquaintance of a neighbor and fellow dog owner, a German expatriate named Harry, an encounter that eventually leads him into contact with a group intent on achieving immortality through human cloning. Known as the Elohimites and nicknamed by Daniel “The Very Healthy Ones,” the group is plainly modeled on the Raëlian movement, a real-life cult founded in France in 1973 by a former musician and race car driver originally known as Claude Vorilhon, subsequently as Raël. As early as 2002, the Raëlians claimed to have achieved total human cloning, including mind and personality transfer, but no proof of the claim was ever offered. Houellebecq, in offering his spin on the topic, borrows the Raëlian term Elohim to describe the extraterrestrials who supposedly created the earth and all civilization. In this case, however, the culture of The Very Healthy Ones stands revealed as a hoax, at least at the moment of its inception, as eventually revealed by one of the original participants. “It was just a joke,” he repeated, “a good joke between stoners. We had taken some magic mushrooms, we went for a walk among the volcanoes, and we began to hallucinate the whole thing. I never thought it would go this far.”

By the early twenty-first century, some three decades later, the Elohim movement has, according to Daniel, attracted a worldwide following, although, “in the best cases, the sect was portrayed as a bunch of cranks and UFO freaks and in the worst, a dangerous organization propagating ideas that flirted with eugenics, if not Nazism.” Daniel himself, drawn toward the movement by sheer curiosity born of boredom, soon finds himself actively courted by the leadership and by the Prophet himself: “Scientology, for example, no doubt benefited from the presence in its membership of John Travolta or Tom Cruise; but I was far below their level. He was, too, if the truth be told.” The movement has homes or bases all over the world, from California to the Canary Islands, and it is there, on the island of Lanzarote, that much of the novel’s action takes place.

The Prophet, born Robert Macaury, like Raël/Vorilhon an erstwhile singer and race car driver, has built on Lanzarote a sumptuous retreat, ostensibly the first stage of an “embassy” to receive the Elohim when they revisit Earth after world peace has been restored. There, he functions very much as the alpha male, with a faithful mistress named Susan and a flock of nubile “fiancées” to ply him with creature comforts. He also feels free to invite other followers to his bedchamber, a whim that in time proves fatal.

The second most powerful figure, after the security chief nicknamed “Cop” by Daniel, is Slotan Miskiewicz, formerly of the University of Toronto, a renegade geneticist who has found among the Elohimites a level of freedom and support for his research that would have been impossible in more respectable academic circles. Nicknamed Knowall by Daniel, Miskiewicz confides to him that his true goal is creation of “the first real cyborg.”

In short, Knowall could not care less about the quasi-religious quest for immortality that seems to animate the other members; his sole allegiance is to science. The Prophet, meanwhile, values Knowall for the veneer of scientific respectability that he imparts to the project, showing that work is in progress toward achieving eternal human life. All one need do, upon joining the Elohimites, is to provide a DNA sample.

Soon after Daniel’s arrival at Lanzarote, the Prophet takes note of a young Italian couple among the new recruits and impulsively chooses the woman as his next bedmate. The following morning, he is found dead in bed with his throat cut, as young Francesca cowers in a corner of the room. Her actor boyfriend, Gianpaolo, is found dead a short time later, having electrocuted himself while trying to scale the security fence. What of the Prophet’s supposed immortality, and how to dispose of the body? In the short term, the first question is soon answered. A young artist named Vincent, whom Daniel first met in Paris and who has helped introduce him to the movement, reveals himself to be the Prophet’s natural son. Until now, Vincent has seemed withdrawn and possibly suicidal; what could be more “natural” than that father and son trade places, as it were, after death?

With the Prophet immolated in a volcano and Vincent, after a media-hyped suspenseful wait of several weeks, “unveiled” as the Prophet’s cloned replacement, the only problem remaining is that of witnesses to the murder, namely Francesca and, by now, Daniel himself, who arrived on the scene early enough to take in all the evidence. When Daniel protests Knowall’s proposal that Francesca be “eliminated” by lethal injection, Knowall coolly reminds Daniel that he himself could be next, thus assuring his complicity and silence with a death threat. At the time, Daniel has no hope of immortality, let alone confidence; he is merely trying to stay alive for the time being. That Knowall’s efforts eventually bear fruit, and that Daniel’s bodily form, personality, and thought processes are passed on to more than a score of successive Daniels, with a succession of cloned corgis, is more or less a happy accident that Houellebecq does not really try to explain.

Shortly before joining the Elohimites, Daniel fancied himself to be in love for a second time, with a beautiful blond pianist and sometime actress named Esther, whom he nicknamed Belle (but not to her face). Openly promiscuous even when they are together, Esther, a quarter-century his junior, could provide “great” sex but no love. In a final meeting with Isabelle, who plans to commit suicide as soon as her aged mother dies, Daniel tells her, “Basically, I will have had two important women in my life . . . the firstyouwho didn’t like sex enough, and the second, Esther, who didn’t like love enough.” He then regains custody of Fox and proceeds toward his own eventual suicide, little suspecting the immortality that awaits him.

In many respects, The Possibility of an Island picks up where an earlier Houellebecq novel, Les Particules élémentaires (1998; The Elementary Particles, also known as Atomised, 2000), leaves off; Knowall’s researches continue and complete those of Michel Djerzinski in the earlier novel, resulting in sex-free replications (As the body reaches its natural term of, say, sixty years, it “dies” and is replaced by a postadolescent replica good for an additional forty years, “programmed” with personality and memory, needing only sunlight, salt, and water for nutrition.) By the time of Daniel24 and Daniel25, the human race has all but disappeared, thanks first to global warming and later to The Great Drying Up. Those few human beings who remain are nomadic savages, ripe for extermination by “neohumans” such as the Daniels.

In his review of The Possibility of an Island for The New Criterion, Stefan Beck observes that Houellebecq “may be genuinely despondent, but his insistence that this is man’s natural state is pure marketing,” adding, “Whatever the case, Houellebecq is laughing all the way to the bank.” Farther on, Beck accuses him of “rewriting the same book again and again,” an accusation which has more than just the ring of truth. With the passage of time, even the rants appear to grow stale. Perhaps Houellebecq the literary streaker is not, after all, in search of a destination but is simply running laps. If so, all the informed reader need do, the next time he is seen approaching, is to look away.