That dream of connection also leads Houellebecq far from liberal individualism. He is a fan of Auguste Comte, who opposed individual rights in the name of scientific altruism. In this, Houellebecq resembles the new generation of post-liberals, who share his concern for the consequences of sexual liberation, and seek a renewed spirit of collectivism, often religious, to combat moral decay. Yet Houellebecq, like Comte, has no time for God.

Comte’s atheism led him to create a Religion of Humanity, hoping to outcompete Christian doctrine. It failed, of course. Houellebecq has no such delusions, only his certainty that transcendence is the ultimate fiction. Sharing Blaise Pascal’s terror at the eternal silence of infinite spaces, he cannot accept Pascal’s wager that belief is a good bet. “I express,” he tells one interviewer, “the horror of the world without God.”

Consciousness of that horror keeps Houellebecq’s work from nihilism. His stories of moral collapse are animated by a deep longing for moral order. In one interview here, he accepts a description of himself as “an almost Christian romantic moralist”. Behind the scenes, too, we find signs of this unrecognised side, in his stance against euthanasia and his work for animal rights.

In the end, though, Houellebecq’s gift is not as a moralist or philosopher, but as a melancholic provocateur. Perhaps the nearest he comes to looking on the bright side is his attitude to the pandemic. “We won’t wake up, after lockdown, in a new world; it will be the same world, but a bit worse.” It’s never sunny in the world of Michel Houellebecq, but since our godless night has already descended, at least it can’t get much darker.

Interventions 2020 by Michel Houellebecq, tr Andrew Brown, is published on April 4 by Polity at £20