Is any of this remotely credible? One would like to think not — there is as yet no successful Islamist political party in France and little sign of one — although it might be worth recalling that on the day that Submission was published in France, gunmen stormed the offices of Charlie Hebdo, murdering 12 people. Among the victims was one of Houellebecq’s close friends. But something does ring true in this unlikely tale and it is this that makes it profoundly discomforting.

Early on in the novel François meets an old friend and colleague called Steve. Steve, we are told, is an expert on Rimbaud, “a sham topic if ever there was one”. His conversation always revolves around academic appointments and promotions and, as a man who could see the way the academic wind was blowing, he was not above endorsing a boycott on academic exchanges with Israeli scholars. Steve reappears at the end of the novel. By this time the Sorbonne has been renamed the Islamic University of Paris, is awash with petro-dollars and staffed exclusively by Muslims. As a man of the Left, Steve, of course, has converted to Islam, is teaching Rimbaud (whose conversion has to be placed beyond dispute) and is only too happy to accept his increased salary. Just as attractively, the university has found him a young wife, with another one on the way. It is almost touching, François comments, that some people still believe in the power of the intellectual elite, to the point that they are prepared to buy them off.

François’s initial response to his own dismissal is to seek to escape. He heads for the south-west of France. It was, François confides, “a region where they ate duck confit, and duck confit struck me as incompatible with civil war”. Having tried to fill his car with petrol and found the cashier lying dead in a pool of blood he arrives first at Martel, named after Charles Martel, victor over the Moorish invaders in 732. Deeper into the Dordogne, he reaches Rocamadour, home to the holy site of the Black Madonna. There, with his mind full of Huysmans and Charles Péguy, he contemplates the statue of the Virgin Mary waiting “in the shadows, calm and timeless”. Although moved to something like a spiritual revelation, he feels the Madonna distancing herself from him little by little over space and the centuries, leaving behind only his “damaged, perishable body”.

Upon his return to Paris, François renews his whoring ways, indulging his taste for sodomy, first with a girl of Tunisian extraction and then with a regular participant in gang bangs called Slutty Babeth. Later he visits the abbey at Ligugé where Huysmans, having converted to Catholicism, lived with the religious community. For all his attempts at religious devotion, François concludes that the “old queer Nietzsche” was right: “Christianity was, at the end of the day, a feminine religion.”

Where then can he turn? The answer comes in the form of Robert Rediger, new president of the Sorbonne and naturally a Muslim convert, who not only flatters his intelligence but plies him with fine wine, introduces him to his new 15-year-old wife and, in the process, convinces him that Europe had committed suicide in a matter of decades. For Rediger the proof lies in the closure of a magnificent art-nouveau bar in Brussels. For François it came with the shutting of a Paris brothel and the loss of certain sexual practices from human memory. But the facts were plain: “Europe had reached a point of such putrid decomposition that it could no longer save itself, any more than fifth-century Rome could have done.” By converting to Islam, François concludes, he would have nothing to mourn. He would accept that the summit of human happiness resided in the most absolute submission.