I thought that if I was going to read any Houellebecq novel, I might as well read one that didn’t have a picture of a semi-naked waif on the cover, but I was deceived. The Elementary Particles was released in the UK and Australia as Atomised, so as it turns out I read the book I was trying to avoid. In any case, I would probably have been better off with the naked lady cover as a warning since the sexual content of the book was so graphic and plentiful that I became paranoid about people on the train glancing at the pages and giving me an unwanted thumbs-up, or some more boisterous equivalent.

But first things first. An introduction informs us that Michel Djerzinski was a key player in the ‘metaphysical mutation’ resulting in a new Western historical era. Then, a (crappy) poem, and we are thrust into the depressing realia of Michel’s middle age: embryos, a poster of the Lakes of Germany, a dead white canary. In 2009, the fictive present, Michel has disappeared, leaving behind materials that re-conceptualise the reproductive process, and humanity as a species.

In its exploration of the fictional prophet’s life, The Elementary Particles wants to have its cake and eat it too; documentary-style prose bookends the narrative, which is in turn interspersed with scientific explanations of phenomena tangentially related to, and ostensibly elucidative of the events at hand. Juggling these three approaches requires the author to have an unfailing and minute sense of balance, but the impacts of the respective devices lack cohesion and direction; the novel is a three-headed snake, and you’re never quite sure which head will strike next, or why.

The first section details the formative years of half-brothers Michel, a biologist who little regrets his life’s emotional nullity, and Bruno Clement, a sex-obsessed teacher whose personal life could be equated to the cost and frequency of his visits to prostitutes. Sourcing the emotional deficit of the hapless siblings requires contemplation of the biological linchpin, but really the fracture, of the family; Michel and Bruno’s mother Janine (later Jane) is a loyal disciple of seventies free love with only one scruple, which is not to initiate her sons into the mysteries of sex herself.

It’s easy to be flippant and disgusted about the degree of attention paid to sex in Houellebecq’s novels. But in addition to putting masturbation and voyeurism on display, The Elementary Particles limns a French masculinity that is self-destructive because circumscribed. While the first section puts on display all the embarrassments, inadequacies, furtivenesses and crimes of sex, the second section deals with the collaborative and healing capacities of sex. But in the respective trajectories of Michel and Bruno, these capacities are explored as potentialities rather than certainties, and the fey scientist, Michel, eventually dismisses it as ‘a form of narcissistic differentiation’, an activity that is so unstable and contingent that it is key to the entropy of rational humankind.

While not altogether successfully executed, The Elementary Particles is assiduous in its self-appointed task: disputing the role of normative sexual practices in an increasingly transactional society. It was written in 2000, and the novel suggested that by the current time the West would have had no choice but to confront the exclusionary effects of difference through deeper analysis of social and sexual mores. Like the dubious privilege of those who, cigarette in hand, watched 1984 pass by, it’s safe to say that Houellebecq’s call-to-arms, though well judged, has not been answered.

I went to and worked at too many sessions to make a summary of each interesting to anyone so, drum roll please for the inaugural 3000 books Melbourne Writers Festival awards. All quotes are approximate and taken from my basically useless scrawl.

Most seen author goes to Hannah Tinti, proud parent of The Good Thief. We probably have the same star sign or something. I saw her so many times that I feel like I know her, I’m going to keep calling her Hannah. It probably comes down to the fact that she is an author of short stories, which I have been consuming like a madperson. I went to the The Young Americans party, too, which featured Hannah. Its three participants all theoretically demurred on the basis of their age (Mark Sarvas, for example, is 43). Finally, I spied her in Aphrodite’s LoveTV, an experience from which I theoretically demurred. I mean, I was there while Hannah discussed intimate tales of love with a lady in an emerald green onesie, but I was drinking red wine in the corner. I wasn’t watching or videotaping or fantasising about buying a tent from Toy Kingdom or anything like that, no.

Best chemistry in a session is a tie. Inside UK Publishing, a wildcard not in the program that I suspect was a late addition (or an oopsie) featured crime writer Mark Billingham and David Shelley, his RP-brandishing editor at Little, Brown. Billingham, who used to be a stand-up comedian, surfed the small crowd with ease. But the most interesting dynamic came from the interaction between Shelley and the chair, Michael Williams, who mentioned that he worked at Text Publishing for 6 years before his current post, which I didn’t catch. Williams and Shelley took pretty obvious stances on the continuum of ‘editor-as-cherisher’ to ‘editor-as-book broker’. Typical quote from Williams: ‘I love this and I want to bring this to the world’. Response from Shelley: ‘The world wants this, and I’m going to bring it to them in its best possible form.’ Great TV, I mean, conversation.

Best chemistry in a session II for me was The Tall Man, where Chloe Hooper and Jeff Waters discussed their wildly different takes, and I would surmise books, on the subject of the death of Mulrunji on Palm Island last year. Hooper had stayed with Mulrunji’s family and was obviously much more emotionally involved, though it was not just this which made her a passionate storyteller. Waters approached his writing task with the ‘change the world’ principle of the socially aware investigative journalist but at a greater distance, and with a focus on the consequences for governance issues. From the sound of the bell, they parried on various points including their chosen ways of referring to Mulrunji and the legal status of inquest evidence. Waters was frank about the constraints applicable to him as an ABC correspondent, though defensive enough that it was difficult not to admire Hooper’s directness. Fraught, wide-ranging, dynamic, just as conversation on such important topics should be.

The ‘You made me sad about Australian Publishing‘ award goes to a publisher who gave Michael Hyde reasons for rejecting his novel as follows: ‘Your novel has too many issues–the main character’s girlfriends is Vietnamese, there’s a youth suicide in the plot, and the guy’s dad is a single father.’

Funniest thing worn on stage: Kate Mosse’s platform sneakers.

Yuckiest moment: I complimented a shall-remain-unnamed author on their session the previous day, and was rewarded with a stony silence. Je regrette.

Most beautifully spoken goes to Nicholas Rothwell on The Essay–’an elusive and demanding form’ which should ideally exhibit the writer’s humility.

Session with the youngest average audience age was How to get published. Which was also the winner of my Way too many panellists award.

And there you have it. Did I say to stop the drum roll? You’d better stop.

I always think of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela as the ‘first novel’, although I know Robinson Crusoe came before. A quick and guilty Wikipedia search informs me that there are several other forerunners. Woe is me and my literary know-how. Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe predates lots of the contenders (take that, Le Morte d’Arthur!). Its estimated date of writing is somewhere between 200 and 300AD. And, for the trivia vultures, Chaereas and Callirhoe by Chariton goes further back even than that, to before 150 AD.

But onto the book itself. I had no idea what it was when I picked it up at a secondhand book shop’s 50% off everything sale. I love me a Penguin Classic, especially one with a picture of a goat suckling a baby on the front cover. The picture depicts Daphnis as he was first seen by his foster parents, abandoned, accompanied by tokens of wealth. Chloe’s babyhood is similar to that of Daphnis; she is found by another peasant couple being fed in a cave by a ewe. Lying beside her are a golden girdle, golden sandals and golden anklets.

Artefacts of ancient Greek and Roman literature are often exemplars of the poetic conventions distilled by theorists such as Aristotle and it’s therefore no surprise that Longus’ plot is almost diagrammatical, with its outstanding economy and transparency. Elements such as character types (for example, the opportunistic, leering Gnathon and Daphnis’ grasping parents), overt sexism and classism, and an utterly servile cause and effect dynamic evoke a time of writing when a novel was a fairly different creature to what it is or can be now–although I realise that the above descriptors could fairly be applied to much modern fiction.

It’s a fun example of escapist fiction. An equivalent modern experience to Daphnis and Chloe would probably be a fairytale or a pantomime, considering the pace and rhythm of the events, the dramatic descriptions and oblique sexual references. Lovely pastoral romances like this spoiled little girls like me, doomed forever to anticipate purer and more exciting romantic experiences than any we would ever know. But they also gave us an enduring love for the prettinesses of what the translator Paul Turner calls a golden world.