As a travel writer, I consider myself extremely fortunate to have made my acquaintance with Michel Houellebecq’s nasty, but exhilarating novel, Platform, which I’ve just re-read. It really goes to town on travel guidebooks. It makes even the most seemingly innocuous travel-writing phrase a cringe-worthy exercise in self-loathing, like the term “a good base camp” (which I know I’ve used previously). In Houellebecq’s hands, this phrase is rendered full of evil intent and cultural imperialism.

I thank the French master for improving my writing. He is indeed a worthy progeny of Camus, but what a frustrating author all the same. The book, if you can get your head around this premise, is ostensibly about sex tourism in Thailand as an antidote to the disconnected lives Western consumers lead. Hoeullebecq has a peculiar style (although more refined than in his previous work, Atomised). Characters pause to ruminate at length on philosophy, sex, death, war, famine, prostitution. The ‘plot’, such as it is, often goes missing in favour of these internal monologues.

Added to that, the narrator is a classic Camus-type observer, unable to alter unfathomable events, the only course of action available to him merely being the ability to ‘act in good faith’.

It’s an essayist mode, but I don’t find it boring or confusing. This author just says it right for me. His potshots at guidebook tourism, Islam vs capitalism, perception vs reality … all of it is raw, honest, funny, bawdy. It was written 3, 4 years back but seems extraordinarily prescient, given the interminable actions of the Iraq occupation and the current suspicion between Indonesia and Australia.

At the end, there’s a classic twist; I saw it coming but it still shocked me. It’s effective. Then the narrator goes and has a pouty, adolescent whinge; “no one loves me, everybody hates me”, he might as well be saying.

But that’s alright, because I’ve got to stop looking for endings. Along the way, there were enough jewels and insights into my own condition for me to actually stop and put the book down, my heart pounding. I personally find that rare in an artform these days.