SOURCE: Liddle, Rod. “Jamais la Politesse.” Spectator 292, no. 9125 (28 June 2003): 41-2.

In the following review, Liddle praises the “transparent beauty” of Houellebecq's prose in Lanzarote but criticizes the novella's impact as “slight.”

‘Slight’, I think, is the adjective I'm looking for here. I started reading Lanzarote as the train pulled out of Waterloo and finished it before Woking. At £9.99 that makes it about as good value, mile for mile, as South West Trains. But, oh, believe me, much more fun.

Houellebecq is celebrated or reviled, depending upon your point of view, as one of those French controversialists who are thrown up every decade or so to discomfort and annoy us. He has been charged, in his homeland, with inciting racial hatred, having allegedly described Islam as a ‘stupid’ religion—an appraisal he amends in Lanzarote to merely ‘absurd’. These days he's a virtual recluse, holed up on an island...