All you need to know is that he is not a danger to society and never has been. But the system doesn't seem to recognise it.In a funny way I've come to see visiting him every three or four weeks in Belmarsh as a kind of privilege Not many of us see what goes on in our prisons It's a case of out of sight, out of mind Over three years, it opened my eyes. He was told he had to go on a release course before he could look for a job, otherwise it would jeopardise his parole, but then it took the authorities four months to arrange a place on one. So he's been getting very frustrated at the restrictions, sitting at home, unable to earn any money. His situation would be pretty hopeless but for the support of his mother - my aunt - and the rest of his family. Once he was out, he found himself in a Catch 22 situation. He'd served three years of his sentence and came out on parole back in March.
He is committed to not offending again and so tried in jail to get on various courses to prepare him for release, but was told there were no places. My cousin has recently been released from Belmarsh high-security prison in south-east London. This is no more than his acolytes expect, since at least a third of a Houellebecq book consists of graphic descriptions of sexual conquest. And yet both a documentary in 2001 and a collection of essays and jottings that appeared in 2003 portray him as happily married, indifferent to praise and unambitious of fame He is, tout court, a bit of a mystery.. He almost never sees his son, who is now in his twenties, and he drinks heavily. Occasionally, if some enterprising editor sends out a pretty reporter, he makes a gloomy pass. When last seen, Houellebecq was living on the remote Beara Peninsula on the west coast of Ireland, with his second wife and an ancient collie that came with the house.
Although his imperfect English is apparently not a problem locally, he asks that all interviews be conducted in French: since not many journalists can manage this, he usually concedes to talk in English, which delivers the pregnant pauses, abstract comments and long silences that play directly to our conception of the French intello. The case was thrown out but he retreated to Ireland to write.What the palaver over Plateforme served largely to obscure was that it was not as good as its predecessor. Lanzarote, a novella hastily translated into English after the success of Platform, proved little more than a dry run for the conceits of that novel. If Houellebecq was not actually blocked and coasting on his reputation, it looked like it.In person he is serious, mournful, almost naive, which sits ill with the force and flash of the prose he writes. Half the writers (even some he had lampooned) in France turned out to speak in defence of a man who said he had never confused Arabs and Muslims - that he was speaking of a religion rather than of a people. Drunk and belligerent, he justified his characters' condemnation of radical Islam with the judgement that it was "the stupidest religion in the world", declaring, to boot, that "when you read the Koran, it's appalling, appalling" He was taken to court for inciting racial hatred. Lanzarote (2000) was interleaved with photographs he had taken while on holiday in the Canary Islands.
