MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ – Platform. Originally published in France as Plateform, 2001. Vintage, trade paperback, July 2004. Translated by Frank Wynne.

   Michel is a single, 40 year old civil servant in the bureau of cultural affairs. His job is to randomly sponsor art events for promising new artists. He gets to decide what’s ‘promising’. He’s good at his work but he’s on autopilot. His heart’s not in it.

   His dad dies. They weren’t close. But he left a healthy inheritance. He takes a vacation.

   So he goes in one those all expenses paid jobs, with a group of 30 strangers, they fly to Thailand.

   Thailand is great for the sex tourism. And that’s really the main attraction for guys like him, other out of shape, middle aged, French and German men, come to sleep with the beautiful, young Thai girls. So expert in their craft.

   One of the other vacationers, Valerie, shows an interest in Michel. Her face is plain but she has a great body. They talk a few times. She makes herself obvious. He gets drunk and passes out. On the last day, he asks for her number. Why? She looks at him in disbelief, then writes her number on a card a gives it to him with a shrug.

   So he calls her. And so begins a torrid affair. Valerie is the most giving of lovers. Turns out she works for the travel company. She’s actually doing quite well.

   Valerie and Michel become inseparable. And he begins to get involved in her work. She is thinking up a way to make more money at the failing resorts her company owns in Cuba and Thailand, the Ivory Coast and the Dominican. They come up with the idea of ‘Aphrodite vacation packages’ — where the marketing makes the sex tourism implicit. And the idea is a winner. The resorts explode in popularity.

   Unfortunately, that might not be the only explosion as Islamic terrorists start targeting these sex resorts for their immorality.

   And that, dear reader, is that.

         ——

   It was a pretty effective piece of work. It reeled me in. I’m not normally the kinda guy who wants to read about international sex tourism. But the thing was told with surgical precision. And the sudden terrorist violence in the midst of the montage of drab bureaucratic mundanity and sexual abandon — Yeah. I’ll remember it and it was pretty damned good.