La Possibilité d’une île

This is no small claim, considering that Houellebecq had consorted with the Raëlian sect and shared drinks with Claude Vorilhon, alias Raël, its self-proclaimed guru, who had invented an extraterrestrial encounter that conveniently designated him as prophet. Houellebecq closely followed the elaborately staged pronouncements of this Geneva-based enterprise of private utility. The protagonist of La Possibilité d’une île, Daniel, and his clones, Daniel25 and Daniel26, are drawn directly from the Raëlian organization, which claimed to have achieved the first human cloning.

“How is it that we end up convinced that Houellebecq has succeeded in his journey to the end of humanity? Simply because he is a novelist. A formidable novelist, in fact, bleak and despairing. Not, as Daniel 1 says of himself, ‘a sort of middle-class Zarathustra,’ but rather a storyteller combined with a hyperrealist scout of today’s society and tomorrow’s world, convinced that everything science allows, including the least desirable outcomes for humanity, will come to pass.” (Franck Nouchi, Le Monde, September 1, 2005)

A delight and a rich field of investigation for Houellebecq, crowned “honorary priest” by Raël himself, as was Michel Onfray, who learned of the honor through the press and retorted that he had asked nothing of this “tribe of fools.”