…By any definition, in France and elsewhere, Houellebecq has become a literary star whose ideas have become secondary to his glittering position in the literary firmament. This applies also to the English-speaking world where, from London to New York, the critical reception of Houellebecq's novels has been unanimously approving and Houllebecq himself described as "the future of French Literature" (even The Daily Telegraph, hardly a bastion of French Stalinism, was moved to describe Les Particules élementaires as "a brave and rather magnificent book"). At home and abroad, as his ideas and moral vision are subsumed into media chatter rather than communication, he has become what he earlier defined in his own terms as "a commodity", and so "a failure".

In part, this "commodification" of radical ideas occurs because the debates around Houellebecq are constituent elements of a well established tradition of argument in France which periodically sees its mission as challenging the very fundament of social-democratic consensus. For a French audience, therefore, Houllebecq's "radically black" style of provocation is understood, and consequently assimilated, as part of a wider cultural and political nexus of ideas.

For an English-speaking audience, on the other hand, life is even simpler: as a writer steeped in the French Communist tradition of committed writing, Houellebecq is a marginal, exotic creature whose ideas will always lie at a considerable remove from the truer concerns of fiction written in English, which are considered truer because they also lie at some remove from politics, and certainly "scientific" Marxism.

But is this really so, especially for those who are writing at the so-called margins of the English-speaking world? Or is it that those writers who hold the monopoly on bleak dystopian visions - Will Self, Irvine Welsh, and more latterly from Wales Niall Griffiths - hold a vision which, no matter how grim, is grounded in a consensual social-democratic view of society which is so deeply entrenched in British writing as to be immutable? The challenge of Houellebecq for the British, and especially the Welsh reader, is that his is a vision which undermines this consensus as it slices away at apparently self-evident truths. The unpalatable nature of what is revealed in this process is, Houellebecq argues, an essential truth revealed by art.

This form of "commitment" in writing, in a post-modernist context where fixed ideas are endlessly dissolved into language and language games, seems in our own age as anachronistic as Houellebecq's unwieldy Communist nostalgia. It is however Houellebecq's almost nineteenth-century ambition to bring literature and political life closer together which is, I would argue, the most important aspect of his work. This is because if politics and art do not mix in this way, if literature cannot at least challenge politics on its own terms, it seems to me that we will, as Michel Houellebecq so chillingly prophesies in Les Particules élementaires, surely get the future we deserve.