Platform Michel Houellebecq William Heinemann, 320pp, £12.99 ISBN 043400989X

Along with Catherine Millet and Michel Houellebecq, one of the bestselling authors in France this past year has been Ovidie, a 21-year-old porn actress. Pierced and dressed in black leather, Ovidie manages to look winsome, cute and sexy all at once ("She makes Catherine Millet look like a bad-tempered primary school teacher," commented one rather overexcited observer). She is a veteran of more than 40 porn films, and describes herself as a feminist, an artist and a philosopher, "un intello du porno" ("an intellectual of porn"). In her book, Porno Manifesto, Ovidie proudly recalls how she discovered pornography in early adolescence and says that it came to her as a revelation at the same tender age that mere physical events could be the source of so much delight and anguish. Pornography, she believes, is about nothing more than the promise of human happiness. The physical and economic exploitation that are undeniably involved in the sex industry, she says, are wrong only because they are a betrayal of this original, quite innocent trust.

This is also the central premise of Platform, Michel Houellebecq's third and most controversial novel, which arrives now in English, in the wake of the literary firestorms that have raged through most of the European countries where it has already been published. Most notably, Houellebecq has been accused of writing pornography as well as defending the most exploitative and despicable forms of sex tourism. A fierce row was already brewing in Paris this time last year when, as the publication date approached, the author was criticised for being misogynistic and racist. Houellebecq was, as ever, indifferent to public opinion. He did not bother to defend himself but spoke out in favour of "sexual communism" and the "democracy of the sex shop", a notion that the sexual market place should be open to all, not only those who succeed with good looks, fame or success.

The row deepened when Houellebecq was challenged on his apparent contempt for Islam (the book's main character rejoices in the massacre of Palestinians on the Gaza Strip). He publicly declared Islam the most stupid and murderous of religions, attracting the hatred of France's large Muslim population and the bafflement of its liberal intellectuals. Houellebecq's wife began to crack up and went missing in Ireland. His publishers started to panic at mention of fatwas. Houellebecq himself, scared and genuinely shaken, drank more heavily than ever and gloomily predicted that he would never write again.

But Platform is still only a novel, albeit an extraordinarily good one. It tells the story of Michel, a disillusioned and depressed Parisian, whose main pleasures, if they are pleasures at all, are drink and the occasional hand job in the peep-shows of the rue St Denis or the rue de la GaIte (Houellebecq has written a poem worthy of Larkin about this street). On holiday in Thailand, Michel discovers that paying for sex can be a life-enhancing experience for both participants. The westerner receives real physical gratification, a sensation that has been degraded or lost in our "spectacular society" of commodity fetishism, image and illusion. (Houellebecq is, unsurprisingly, a keen reader of Guy Debord, who originally coined the phrase "society of the spectacle".) The Oriental, in return, without guilt or shame, takes the cash.

Michel's discovery coincides with the beginning of his first real love affair, with Valerie, a beautiful and energetic travel agent who is always ready to indulge Michel in his taste for group sex with random strangers. They return to Paris and plan to set up a company devoted to sex tourism. This indeed is the manifesto, the "platform" of the book's title: that, for the first time in history, as globalised technology and affluence meet, human beings need not be sexually alone and therefore unhappy ever again; utopia is at hand.

Houellebecq does not really believe this, any more than in real life he takes part in the seamlessly choreographed orgies that are a leitmotif of the novel. He is a reader of Aldous Huxley and H P Lovecraft and takes from them the idea that utopias are impossible because pleasure, the chief goal of western society, is not really related to happiness. Accordingly, this book is written not in a spirit of irony or mischief or deliberate provocation, but demonstrates a genuine commitment to understanding why, in a post-industrial, post-Christian world where money and technology fulfil all material needs, happiness still seems so far away.

The attacks on Islam are bitter and, naturally, offensive to Muslims. Houellebecq has offered a weak defence of these sections of the book, saying that "it is only a fiction" and that mere narrative logic demands that, when Valerie is killed by extremists, Michel should delight in vengeance against Arabs. However, Houellebecq's real objection to Islam is, I think, that it offers a total challenge to western Enlightenment values. Houellebecq began his career as a kind of Marxist, and the "medieval nostalgia" of Islamic thought is bound to conflict with his way of thinking (this position finds a parallel in the remains of the French Marxist left, for which the term multiculturalism is still a mystery).

The virulence of Houellebecq's dislike comes, in a more complicated way, from his compassion. Like Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the anti-Semitic novelist of the 1930s whom he most resembles both in style and content, Houellebecq has a horror of suffering and violence (he expresses particular distaste for sadomasochistic practices). Celine's anti-Semitism was disgusting in the 1930s and is made more so by history; yet it did not make him a lesser novelist. The same applies to Houellebecq. One of the most striking and unsettling features of Platform is the touching pathos, even tenderness, with which the heterosexual orgies are described, in opposition to the murderous puritanism of Islamic terror. Houellebecq seeks out a symmetry in the most unlikely scenarios: the description of the double penetration of Valerie by a white man and a black man is worthy of the surrealist Hans Bellmer, for example. If this is pornography, it is also of the highest poetic order.

For good or ill, there are few writers in any language who understand the tensions of the present age as well as Houellebecq. Will Self has dismissed him as "a little guy who can't get enough sex", but, as this book makes clear, it is precisely this aspect of his character that makes him so genuinely alienated, and therefore dangerous. This is still the same writer who, when I met him in his council flat in Paris six years ago, giggling, drunk and then all of a sudden very serious, declared himself at war with the world.

Houellebecq was then working on Les particules elementaires (Atomised), the book that catapulted him into the literary stratosphere in London and New York as well as Paris. This was a book which, like Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, charted the decline and fall of a generation that had lost all sense of moral purity. (The comparison with Flaubert is not entirely fatuous; the similarity has been observed by several distinguished French critics, and even Julian Barnes concedes the point.) "This book will either make me famous or destroy me," I recall Houellebecq saying at the time. In the event, Atomised went on to confirm him as the sharpest and most perceptive chronicler of our era.

Friends who have seen him recently say he talks often of suicide. But it is never clear whether this is to be taken literally or as a metaphor. Now that he really is famous, it remains to be seen whether Platform - a subtler, more daring and more politically explicit work even than Atomised - fulfils the second part of Houellebecq's slurred prophecy.

Andrew Hussey is the author of The Game of War: the life and death of Guy Debord (Pimlico)

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