Group sex on a volcanic island

Anbody interested in contemporary literature should read Michel Houellebecq's novels Atomized (1998) and Platform (2001). They are the most scathing accounts of Western society to have appeared in our time.

Houellebecq (pronounced Wellbeck) is a writer without shame or moderation. He goes right to the core. Every page he writes focuses on the emptiness of Western materialism, the savage equation between sexuality and death that our freedom has exposed to us, the way that liberty brings us not happiness but suffering.

But he is equally harsh about other cultures and the founding monotheisms, notoriously Islam (he stood trial in Paris last year for having called Islam "the most stupid religion").

Lanzarote is pretty much for Houellebecqian completists only, though. It was first published in France in 2000, between Atomized and Platform, in an expensive limited edition containing prints of 24 photographs of the island by Houellebecq.

It is now available in a cheap edition (Lanzarote et autres textes, Librio, e1.52 ) accompanied by some brilliant essays, about cloning, sex-clubs, and so on. Unfortunately, this English version gives us the novella - a scant 80 pages only - plus some of the pictures of Lanzarote's arid landscapes.

On the eve of the millennium, the depressed narrator books a week's package holiday, more or less at random, on Lanzarote. There he takes to the paucity of tourist attractions, the starkness of the environment - "the conflict, so evident in Lanzarote, between two great forces: the volcano's creation and the sea's destruction."

He joins forces with Rudi, a miserable police inspector from Brussels, and a pair of liberated German lesbians, Pam and Barbara, with whom he is soon enjoying friendly group sex (fondly detailed by our author), which makes him as happy as Larry.

Rudi, however, is too wretched to participate. Instead, he joins a weird religious sect, the Azraelians, who believe aliens are coming to Earth to clone the faithful.

The next we hear of him he is standing trial, with other cult members, accused of paedophilia.

Lanzarote is little more than a minor variation on the themes of Platform, most worth reading for a few characteristically sardonic asides.

"Norwegians are translucent; exposed to the sun, they die almost immediately," for example. Or: "Fat and prickly, the cactus symbolises perfectly - not to put too fine a point on it - the abjectness of plant life."

The translation is fluent - although is "absurd" a true rendering of the word "merdique" (calculatedly applied once more to Islam)?