SOURCE: Feehily, Gerry. “Sex Tourism.” New Statesman 130, no. 4554 (10 September 2001): 54.

In the following review, Feehily argues that Plateforme is a disturbing, if somewhat flawed, novel whose satire and absurdity is lost on Houellebecq's detractors.

Michel Houellebecq is back, and his new novel, Plateforme, has already come under vehement attack. Since the publication of Atomised in 1998, Houellebecq has been not only the most prominent of French authors, but also the most controversial, not least for his unconventional opinions on the sexual revolution. Often overlooked, however, is how he grants his fictional characters the freedom to contradict his own pet theories, finding fulfilment as they do in the type of sexual liberalism he seems to denounce. Full of such novelistic contradictions, Plateforme (not available in English until September next year) is a baffling study of sex tourism and a moral examination of the consequences of globalisation.

A 40-year-old administrator at the...