James Meek

The advantage of a story set in wartime is that all the characters are obliged to form a relationship with death. Death is the life and soul of the war party. You can get death to come to parties in peacetime, too. Murders happen. Cars crash. Cancer buds. But he isn’t expected in every house, on every street. In the novels of European peace, the consequences of betrayal are difficult to...

In the slow weeks before the Taliban fled Kabul, weeks of B-52 vapour trails drawn across blank blue skies, of sporadic bombing and constant rumour, it was easy to find General Abdul Basir. He kept open house in his office, a small, single-storey building at the mouth of the Salang Valley. Bare mountains crowded close on every side, shutting out the light. Basir was building a grander suite...

In 1870, the Imperial authorities in London ordered a heraldic designer to come up with a flag and crest for a part of the British Empire called Turks and Caicos. The designer had never heard of the place, but he was sent a sketch by a local artist which showed a typical scene: men wielding long-handled instruments and, behind them, large white mounds. Public interest in Arctic exploration...

A few weeks ago I visited a clove plantation. The cloves – buds on a tree that, with its black and white bark, looks a bit like a birch – weren’t yet ripe: they were small, bright green and juicy. At the prompting of the guide, I picked one off the tree, put it in my mouth and chewed it. A second before I took the immature clove, it was a part of the living tree. It consisted of millions of clove cells, each containing a complete set of clove genes built up from DNA. In each cell, tens of thousands of clove proteins were interacting. Using the clove genes as a template, some clove proteins were assembling fresh clove proteins, other clove proteins were sending messages to each other, and yet more clove proteins were using the gene templates to replicate the genes themselves as part of the construction of new clove cells. That’s the substance of life’s continuity: genes acting as templates for proteins, which copy the genes, which act as templates for proteins, and so on and on for ever. I put that little green thing in my mouth, with its billions of alien clove genes and clove proteins fizzing in their sudden emergency. And I didn’t turn into a clove.

This is the third of Michel Houellebecq’s novels, and in it, as in the previous two, his hero yearns, mostly in vain, for men and women who are strangers to each other to reach out spontaneously and touch each other: for men to be able to dispense with verbal courtship, for women to put aside cultural restraint, discrimination and any desire to be seduced; and for the sexes to spend as...