The intended effect of satire is, normally, to draw an audience’s attention towards the absurdity of reality. Take the inherent strangeness of life, turn it up a few more notches, and let the viewer make the logical connection between the end product and the source material. By exposing the absurd, a creator opens the opportunity for analysis, a chance to see everyday wrongs for what they are when the trappings are too garish to ignore. Lament lies at the core of mockery.

Michel Houellebecq’s Submission (orig. Soumission, published January 2015 by Flammarion in France) is satirical, but not designed to be so strange as to be openly funny. Through the eyes of a middle-age literature professor, it sees a France of 2022 struggling to square the circle of political deadlocks — a failed center-right, a failing center-left, an ascendent National Front, and the surprising success of an Islamic political party. When the “center” parties throw support behind the Muslim Brotherhood’s presidential candidate to deny Marine Le Pen the Élysée, societal changes like the establishment of K-thru-college Islamic schooling, wider use of Islamic dress, and legal polygamy shortly follow.

François, the protagonist, is mostly uninteresting. Exhausted at 44, a professor of literature unmoved by politics, wanting to die but too indifferent to take his own life, he serves as a stand-in for a particularly French (and generally Western) intelligentsia who no longer have much bearing on the pulse of a nation, nor strength of will to defend the humanist Enlightenment values that sit at the heart of the West’s self-mythology. He is a character who has nothing to live for besides sex, alcohol, and tobacco. One should not get too invested in him beyond his being something of a stock character Houellebecq uses to tie a longer historical timeline to the present.

The narrative tie requires an academic, and so François. The subject he has devoted his few academic efforts to is the 19th Century Decadent author Joris-Karl Huysmans — François pursues Huysmans’s footsteps, finally unlocking an insight that Huysmans, for all his pique in scandalizing the upper castes of his time, at heart wanted nothing more than to enjoy a good bourgeois life (a good meal, a warm hearth, a good conversation, and plum brandy) while hedging bets against death through a conversion to Catholicism that allowed him to more or less live out these joys. From the depths of material excess exemplified by his earlier Decadent work À rebours, Huysmans finds his way to the relative simplicity and security a Catholic faith can offer him. He stares into the abyss of ornamentation for ornamentation’s sake and cannot find the strength to leap; a retreat to a “grounded” alternative follows.

As a bachelor of the 21st Century, François is himself staring into a sort of abyss. Sex is digitized, absurd, or both, the only thing of interest at work is staff gossip or chasing students, he has no relationship with his parents or anyone else really (indeed, he’s contemptuous of most everyone), all he eats are microwave dinners or take-out, mass politics holds out nothing of interest to him. As before, life is a burden he has no strength to navigate through. Then, like Huysmans, François is given a chance to retreat. Not to Catholicism, of course; that had lost its pull over millennia knuckling under to its temporal adversaries.

Instead, he has the opportunity to find a second academic wind (with a huge Saudi- and Qatari-funded salary), a wife dedicated solely to making him meals, a different wife dedicated solely to his sexual desires, a third wife for the hell of it, and all the alcohol he could want behind closed doors by a “simple” conversion to Islam. That Islam offers a metaphysical explanation of the universe and the nature of its creator to assuage Francois’s existential pessimism is an added perk — in the end, he becomes a convert because his desire for the kicks of a modern bourgeois life can be secured by uttering a phrase in Arabic he only learns phonetically. In a sense, then, François stands in to show that like any other class or group in a winner-takes-all capitalistic society, intellectuals prove just as committed to getting their own at any cost.

When Islam and its prohibitions against women’s participation in society are brought to bear on French academia, there is quite a large core of male faculty who make little fuss of staying in their posts while their female colleagues are forced out of public life. Inside every population are self-interested cores containing self-interested cores containing self-interested cores. Self-satisfaction always wins out, over and above norms supposedly agreed upon as foundational to a much wider group (i.e. citizens of a nation). The apparent ease with which fundamental beliefs fall away in Submission is too absurd to be taken as a serious prognostication of a coming future, but the inherent weaknesses and contradictions of the Western democratic poster children are thrown into the light for all to see.

The disturbing part of all this isn’t so much the Islamic awakening in France and Europe mooted by this book — to get caught on that point is to take the end result of the plot too literally. It could’ve been resurgent fascism, corporate state communism, creeping authoritarian evangelical Christianity, or any other number of current movements antithetical to the Enlightenment who offer a society’s stakeholders a “safe” alternative to the soulless nowhere contemplated to be the state of the world today. No, it is concerning because such retreats are regular occurrences in human history. Why, then, should this time of malaise prove any more resistant?