The ascendancy of London’s new mayor eerily resembles the election of a “moderate” totalitarian Islamist president of France in Michel Houellebecq’s painfully sharp, controversially timed satire Submission. Meanwhile, the ever-growing slate of campus outrages reflects a subtler, no less insidious submission that was also subject to Houllebecq’s grim parody.

As Submission‘s narrator, Francois is a perfect caricature of flimsy resistance to thought-control and political takeover. Perfect because he is an isolated academic, a fan of accepting sex acts from students and microwavable dinners washed down with grocery store wine. He’s a deeply but narrowly accomplished scholar of Joris-Karl Huysmans, the semi-obscure novelist of the French decadent movement. Unlike nineteenth-century Huysmans, whose conversion to Christianity has always been an aesthetic disappointment to Francois, Houellebecq’s creation is a victim of modern-day decadence and moral vacuity. Francois, armed with very little conviction, timidly resists until he just can’t be bothered anymore.