Platform

My mother has this way of describing French films as though they themselves are a separate genre.  She half whispers the word “French” as though she’s saying something awfully taboo.  I always imagine it just like that, in italics.  And it struck me whilst reading Platform that it is a book that my mum would deem decidedly French.  Of course, it is actually French which probably swayed my opinion somewhat.  What I’ve always taken my mum to mean by French is fucking and philosophy.  Us Brits are kind of shit at talking about either without either embarrassment or pretension and French culture seems to be wonderfully frank about both.

The book itself is about Michel, a hoary middle aged man with a predilection for whorey young women, and a life changing holiday he takes following his father’s death.  By that I mean, he goes to Thailand, visits some “massage parlours” and then set up sex tourism package holidays with a woman he meets out there and her boss.  There’s a lot of sex and quite a lot of discussion of the tourism industry for 150 pages or so.  This is followed by some arbitrary plot where it all goes wrong at the end.  This is immensely frustrating, as the plot bits are interesting.  The social theory of tourism and consumerist buying habits, less so.  But it is very French.

Michel Houellebecq’s writing is terribly masculine.  I’m not sure if this an intentional thing by him around a matter of factness surrounding sex, or an inability on the part of the translator to come up with any synonyms, but I lost count of the amount of times the word “penetrate” or some deviation of it is used.  I’m pretty sure that Houellebecq’s not going for eroticism in Platform; but “penetrate” is really not a sexy word.  When this is combined with the fact that most of the women that Michel is penetrating don’t even have names and are merely treated as sexual commodities it really isn’t one to get your motor running.  In fact there’s a fairly lengthy defence of the commercialisation of sex.  Michel, if not Houellebecq, is firmly in the “prostitution is empowering” camp.  On top of this, Michel is a forty-odd year old misogynist and manages to find Valerie, a woman in her twenties who is not only enamoured by Michel but actively encourages him to include prostitutes into their sex life.  It’s unfeasible.

For me, Platform is a mixed bag.  While I’m not too keen on all the anonymous sex, I do enjoy the characters’ personal philosophies; whether it be Valerie’s explanation for why she wants to move to Thailand, “The only thing the Western world has to offer is designer products.  If you believe in designer products you can stay in the West; otherwise, in Thailand you can get excellent fakes.”  Or, a dying man’s ruminations on the nature of life and the human condition; “You get old.”  I love these little moments that add nothing but humour to the story. 

The funny moments make it so much more frustrating.  It’s impossible to write the book off as fantasy wank material for men having a mid-life crisis when it is at times charming and witty.  It was also a bit of a learning curve about French culture.  This is a book about tourism and jetting off around the world, set in 2001 that doesn’t mention 9/11.  This is unfeasible from a British perspective, but from the European perspective it wasn’t the event that changed everything forever.  Clearly the benefits of not giving a shit George W Bush are even more far reaching than I ever imagined.  This is probably why the French have so much time for sex and philosophy.

Book number 325 is the return of Lord Peter Wimsey in Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Nine Tailors.  It’s set in Norfolk, so I’m right excited.