SOURCE: Dillon, Brian. Review of Platform, by Michel Houellebecq. Times Literary Supplement, no. 5194 (18 October 2002): 24.

In the following review, Dillon finds Platform to be a tedious, schematic work that is further marred by its English translator.

Despite his latest narrator's protest that “I had never known boredom”, boredom is the most fascinating thing about Michel Houellebecq's three novels. With Platform he has written a book even more mired in tedium—in a blank, implacable, cosseting dullness: not at all the ache of metaphysical ennui—than his earlier works, Extension du domaine de la lutte and Les Particules élémentaires (translated, suitably dully, as Whatever and Atomised). The author no longer seems willing to allow his readers to orient themselves to all this boredom of their own accord; apparently afraid that they will simply switch off, Houellebecq has written a novel at once intriguingly dull and tediously excited about its...