During my interview with Michel Houellebecq, none of the following occur: I am not propositioned by the writer who makes a habit of chatting up female interviewers; no incendiary racist or libellous remarks are made; he does not undress and start having sex with his wife, a spectacle with which another journalist was entertained. For God's sake, he isn't even drunk, though quite possibly he has been, and, from the bleary focus, not so long ago. For the self-restraint I am grateful; though since he is so famously drawn to the nubile, this sandy-haired little vole has the power to make you feel like a granny at a pyjama party. If you believe his press (he resents journalists, but never have they been more helpful to the building of celebrity, one that has made him a multimillionaire), sex is all to Houellebecq, sole refuge from a value-free, disintegrating society. In his novels the antiheroes are usually hanging on for dear life to a vagina - an organ he generally prefers to its owners - but the novelist who has shocked us with his lit porn and personal fondness for swingers' clubs will tell me that sex is no longer easy to come by. To be honest, you can see why. 'Do you know what they call the fat stuff around the vagina,' jokes the protagonist of the new book. 'The woman!'
Houellebecq has become an international mascot for the dissenting classes, a black-humoured would-be rock star of ideas, one of the few novelists - or writers, for that matter - for decades with a radical and persuasive critique of how we live. He works in fiction but his vision of the greedy, lazy, morally disfigured wretches we've become is one with which no vote-conscious politician would ever dare concur, and every half-sentient reader relates to. Overturning assumptions about only feelgood novels making money, for Houellebecq rancour sells. He is the literary equivalent of a mercurial football star: dangerous, flashily talented, a crowd puller, earning a transfer fee of £1.3m when he switched publishers recently; already selling 350,000 copies of his latest novel published only months ago. In our less bookish culture, 5,000 is considered a successful hardback sale; between his second and third novels, his British sales leapt from 12,919 to 56,359. His new works are anticipated with the feverish impatience that usually attends only miracle diet books and tell-all biographies. Moreover, he gets what he wants. When Michael Winterbottom approached him a few years ago to discuss making a movie of his second novel, Atomised, he would only agree if he could direct it himself, a vaguely laughable idea at the time. In his new contract with the publisher Hachette, he has been given just such an option, and will be directing the film of his new book, The Possibility of an Island, when he is ready.
Thirty years ago, Roland Barthes, a French intellectual of the old school, announced the author was dead, meaning that the reader was equally responsible for creating meaning. Houellebecq's supporters laugh that, with his gunslinging reputation and talent for needling the bourgeoisie, he has resuscitated the corpse, but within five minutes of our introduction, I am wondering if I will be able to keep him alive long enough to complete our narcoleptic exchange.
And Houellebecq is also an important commodity: he fuels debate, sells books and, as the streets of Paris and Toulon burn, he is the only exportable writer in a once vaingloriously cultural nation with a view on modern unrest; post-Marxist, anti-Freud, he sees not fury about injustice but an ugly, predatory appetite for sex, pleasure and luxury goods. As literary events go, we have Harry Potter; France has Houellebecq's post-apocalyptic orgies. We have schoolchildren fighting dragons; they have their leading author chasing the dragon and unafraid to admit it.
In 2001, Houellebecq was sued by Muslim authorities for calling Islam 'the most stupid and murderous of all religions' in an interview with Lire magazine on the publication of his novel Platform. He won his court case, but there were safe houses and death threats. 'This man hates you' was a headline of the Moroccan newspaper Liberation. He fled his Irish home for a safe house in Paris, and still can't give public readings in France. Did he fear he was the new Rushdie? 'I was conscious when I was writing of what happened to him, but it was different. He wrote that verses of Allah were inspired by the devil, whereas what I said could pass for the stupid comment of an ignorant racist; less threatening, so I never thought there would be a fatwa.'
His publishers apologised to the mosques but he never did, garnering instead a reputation as a prophet, since that apology was made on the day that planes flew into the Twin Towers. Indeed, insults are the motor of his work, the spark of spite that activates all his best characters: Bruno in Atomised calls a black man a 'baboon'; Michel in Platform gets a little thrill whenever he hears a Palestinian child has been killed; good-looking women are only 'good for f***ing'.
Today in Edinburgh he reminds me of a dormouse woken mid-hibernation: both sleepily compliant and mildly stunned by everything you say. He glides to the door of his gloomy suite at the George hotel offering a shy smile and an oddly firm handshake while his left hand flip-flops camply on its wrist. He seems effete, listless; he can barely be bothered with more pointless questions, though he wants to plug his new book. Literature's hot property is frail and shivery, a tiny figure in clothes that drown him: a green flannel plaid shirt and corduroy trousers belted high. He has just bought them in an attempt to keep warm on the hottest October day - sizzling, T-shirt weather - Scotland has seen in a century. There is playfulness in his eyes, but it dies quickly. His loneliness is palpable, his laughter mirthless: tea and madeleines with the new Proust is no picnic.
For a start you can't trust a word he says: his latest biographer turned down his offer of co-operation because he so fictionalises his own life. One minute he's telling you he hasn't seen his father since he was a child, the next it was that father's advice that steered him towards studying agronomy. The pauses in his speech are oceans: you ask a question, he says nothing, then groans softly in an embarrassingly sexual sort of way, and his answers are flimsy, almost absent.
The fame is double-edged - arguably, it damaged his marriage, threatened his life, forces him to endure interviews like this one - but he needs proof that he has made it. 'It is very difficult to be known but not read,' he says in his shy, thickly accented voice. 'People think they know what it is inside without reading the books, so I am starting to consider changing my name. Of course the publisher won't like it.'
I am not so sure he wants to disappear: invisibility was his sorry lot for too long, the consequence of anonymous drudgery as a civil servant. But he was also a French punk who saw the Clash in Paris and finally metamorphosed into the threat to society he always dreamt of being. Not so long ago he had a hit as a rap artist, intoning his poetry over the beat and gracing the cover of Radikal hip-hop magazine. 'Le rock c'est ma culture!' (Though when a friend reveals his partiality to 10cc's I'm Not in Love and, heaven help him, the Korgis' Everybody's Got to Learn Sometime, the mantle of cool slips dramatically.) He has made a soft-porn movie, but there is no vestige of Left Bank glamour in his naughtiness; no sense that he relishes being annoying.
Houellebecq's fictional world as depicted in Whatever (1994), Atomised (1998) and Platform (2001) is a terrible place, in thrall to market forces and violent bigotry.
It is also honest and funny. The co-narrator of the new book, Daniel, is an outrageous comedian making a porn film called Munch on My Gaza Strip (My Huge Jewish Settler) in a world where there is no faith, no lasting romance, no high art, just the quest for instant gratification; in other words, today. Disgusted by ageing and sexual rejection, he commits suicide, but not before consigning his DNA to a cult that will ensure that a millennium later, the clones Daniel 24 and Daniel 25 are safely immortal in their sterile compound. Untroubled by genetically amputated emotions like lust and regret, they ponder with revulsion the few remaining human savages who cavort and copulate beyond the security fence.
The only unconditional love comes from Daniel's adored dog, Fox, also cloned; indeed in real life, Houellebecq's affection seems to be provided by his corgi, Clement (a fellow male with attractiveness issues), who is also his device for injecting tenderness into the dispassionate genre of science fiction. The standard softeners of the human heart, small children, are dealt with in an advert featuring a brat screaming for sweets, with the slogan: 'Just Say No. Use a Condom'.
