The Map and the Territory

Michel Houellebecq is the enfant terrible of French fiction despite this sounding vaguely ridiculous for a man firmly entrenched in his fifth decade. His award-winning and hard-hitting novels tend to polarise opinion; there are familiar themes that span his oeurve - graphic sex and prostitution, ageing, genetics and cryogenics, tourism and consumerism.

Most of these themes are prominent in his latest novel, The Map and the Territory. The central character Jed Martin is a listless bourgeois artist who ascends into the public's consciousness through digital art created using Michelin maps of France. After a fallow period, he embarks upon painting a series of portraits of people in their working environment, culminating in his pièce de résistance of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs together. Through orchestrated management and manipulation of the market, the gallery sells all the paintings resulting in Jed becoming seriously wealthy.

This is Houellebecq's most accessible novel to date and it brims with pathos and humour. As a novelty Houellebecq introduces living French celebrities into the narrative, including himself, who he deliberately and humorously derides before spectacularly killing off later in the book in a gruesome execution. Yet despite the horrific scenes, it is impossible to avoid laughing out loud when Houellebecq describes his own funeral – here is an author eschewing the overwrought prose of his earlier works and showing some welcome humility. Gone are some of the Houellebecq trademarks such as rants against those in society he reviles. The needless goading of Frederick Forsyth in his earlier work Platform was pitiful and barely worthy of a great author, although there has always been the suggestion that Houellebecq panders to his own controversy.

But this book is a riff on the fickle nature of the art world, and the ethereal characters who inhabit it, along with modern France's vacuous fixation with celebrity culture, and the arrival of moneyed Russians and Chinese – a new breed of colonisation now the English are receding from the French countryside. This is Houellebecq at his best – making social observations of what he sees around him, and the result is a breathtaking read.