The forecast is safe because Houellebecq, politically incorrect, depressive and a master provocateur, is France’s biggest literary star, as well as being a hate figure for much of the Paris Left Bank. His last two novels, Particules élémentaires (published as Atomised in Britain) and Plateform, chronicles of pessimism and jaded sex written in a flat, documentary voice, were international bestsellers.

Plateform, published in 2001, also landed Houellebecq in court when anti-racist campaigners had him prosecuted — unsuccessfully — for calling Islam the most stupid religion.

His new opus, La Possibilité d’une île (The Possibility of an Island), arrives after a four-year wait with the most elaborate pre-launch campaign in Gallic publishing history. The topics of Houellebecq’s previous novels were wifeswapping, sex-tourism and Islamic terrorism. This time he writes admiringly of the Raelians, the alienworshipping sect led by Claude Vorilhon, a self-styled space-time traveller. The sect claimed to have cloned a human two years ago.

“It is an exploration of old age and our obsession with eternal youth, set in an apocalyptic future,” the writer said. In one of the few printable quotes from the book, cited in Paris Match, Houellebecq’s character complains about 21st-century decadence — the author’s favourite theme. “You could be a swinger, bisexual, transvestite, zoophile, S-and-M, but you were not allowed to be old.”

The publisher, Fayard, has prepared a 200,000 initial run and quick release in translation in Europe and America after paying Houellebecq a record £1 million for the book and a film script. The book will be published in Britain in October by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Fayard has whipped up interest by imposing secrecy and refusing advance copies except to a handful of friendly critics. This has prompted acres of media coverage and hostile reviews of pirated versions and could help to make Houellebecq the first French writer to break into the US best-seller lists since Marguerite Duras with L’Amant in the Eighties.

It is a sign of the author’s star status that two anti-Houellebecq books are also due out next week. One is an unauthorised biography by Denis Demonpion; in the other, Help! Houellebecq’s back!, Eric Naulleau denounces the writer as a talentless fraud.

Detractors cannot fathom the success of a racist, sexist writer who hates modern life, seems obsessed with fellatio and affects a style of utter banality. Houellebecq said recently: “Storytelling bores the s*** out of me. I am absolutely not a storyteller.”

Houellebecq’s admirers say that the dreary banality is the whole point: it is the deadpan satire of a genius.

Before Island is even published, it is tipped to win the Goncourt, France’s most august literary prize.

LIFE STORY

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