A novel exploring love, human isolation, and lineage. We follow the life narrative by Daniel, as canonized into a religious text, and commented by his 25th “neo-human” clone, two millennia later. While the novel starts off with a cynically vulgar coating, it does develop into an interesting meditation on the human condition, managing to tie together its disparate scenes into a broader reflection.
Thematically, the ideas in the book flow from a central idea: humans reproduce sexually. We don’t live forever, but die. Biologically, our perennity can only be assured partially ; we can mate and pass on some of our genetic information onto our offspring. Genetic success is determined not just by the ability to survive, but crucially on the ability to mate. This idea forms a kernel of the novel. Humans evolved under the pressure of sexual selection, and have a hard-wired motivation and fascination with sex. Beyond survival, reproduction is a powerful driver of the evolution of social interaction. Over time, basic instincts motivate actions, and these evolve, intertwining with those of others, to form a social fabric, which weaves itself into a society.
Human relationships expand far beyond our instinctual impulses, our motivations are abstract, complicated, and, often, irrational. Particularly human among these motivations is that of love, often noted for its irrationality, as well. Basic instincts have a primitive transactionality which love aspires to transcend. We love without an eye towards utility, and we long towards being loved, even if we don’t feel deserving of it. Love is profound more so than it is powerful. While it can be enthralling, there’s a violence to basal instincts, a reactivity that gives them the upper hand in the moment. The profundity of love is felt painfully in its absence. A culture of short-term gratification seems to also be one of long-term isolation.
This tension characterizes our protagonist, Daniel. In sum, the two major relationships of his life—in Houllebecq fashion, our protagonist also had a third relationship: failed marriage resulting in a child, before any of the events of the novel, which is summarily served to us as character decoration—portray this tension: in his marriage, he is loved, but not sexually gratified, in his affair with a young actress, he seeks and gets sex, but is never loved by her.
At no point is the moral lesson to “choose love”—the only moralizing the novel does engage in is satire, particularly for the elite, the proles are portrayed, cynically, as not being worthy of satire–the protagonist is never punished for his choices, being granted eternal life (albeit, through cloning) as a benefit of elite status in a scientific religious cult. He never shows an ounce of remorse for leaving his first wife because of her naturally aging. Instead, he dies in self pity, begging his young ex-girlfriend to see him, even just for a moment, with his pleas going unanswered.
The culmination of the novel has society undergo a profound transformation, in which sexual mores liberalize, but reproduction declines in favor of a radical new process of cloning, promising eternal life through membership in the new world religion. The end result is a completely atomized society of the future, in which humans have no interaction with each other but through sparse video messages. They may survive together, but whether or not they live is another question entirely.