2084: la Fin du Monde by Boualem Sansal

I just read Ayoub El Mouzaïne's take down of Chanson Douce and the Prix Goncourt more generally on Arablit, and it reminded me that I had intended to review 2084 at some point after abandoning it on my Southwest road trip. Not even the clever coincidence of the title and my carrying around of this book around the Grand Canyon could encourage me to make it past the second section. This book was garbage. Native informant red meat for the people at Galligrasseuil, such a passionless boogeymanning of Islam you'd think it was ghost written by Pamela Geller.
I can barely bring myself to describe the plot. It involves a single gimmick of high school fan-fiction sophistication. If two years ago it was all the rage for North Africans to riff off of classics like l'etranger, this year we get a terrible Orwell impression. In the book — Ati, who has spent two years in a sanatorium, meets an archaeologist, Nas, who has found evidence of a village in which men escape the power of the prophet Abi and his religion worshipping Yölah. Yölah? I believe this is breaking at least three fantasy fiction rules for naming characters. Yölah is such a goddamn ridiculous fig-leaf, one-assonant change from Allah, it's almost too obvious to be satire. In English it would be equivalent to saying the prophet shmohammed who preaches of Shallah. Ati later goes on to reveal the lies which make up the ideology of Abistan (a.k.a. Agraba, city of wonder and enchantment). Between that Hardy-Boys-level-of-narrative-sophistication plot, the authors describes a dystopian theocratic world in which independent, critical thought is suppressed by the demands of religion, enforced by technology. Why would you want to read such a sloppy, lazy allegorical attack on religion set in a desert dystopia when you could just read Dune? 
The protagonist is somehow the victim of the horrors of theocratic denkverbot, stranded at a sanatarium at the edges of an empire suffering from complete cultural amnesia, but acknowledges as much using practically the same words. An even remotely plausible narrator in this situation wouldn't realize the conditions of ideological oppression, otherwise they would be about ready to collapse. Even at the brink, it would be more likely that a person would still be living under the spell of the eternal nature of their life world, what Alexei Yurchak describes in his book title on the last Soviet generation as "Everything Was For Ever, Until It Was No More". There is no effort to portray the experiential depth of life under the hypnosis of theocracy, just a bunch of fucking silly set pieces like electronic prayer monitors, and invented languages. Even those aren't introduced or used to any effect, just there to make the reader mutter under her breath "oh, I get it, it's like 1984 but with Muslims."
That is unless, unless Boualem Sansal and the entire French literary establishment (and I can't imagine Houellebecq having the Andy Kaufman-esque sense of humor to pull it off) are all working together to pull off the greatest literary hoax of all time, in which they all laud a book that is so obviously stupid, written hastily like a prop in a movie you can only see in passing, a book jacket with "The Threat of Sh-islam" written on it. A conspiracy whose aim is to ridicule the entire edifice of intellectual production and their completely predictable islamophobia all in the effort of once and for all making a meaningful statement on the lingering Vichy-ist cancer deep in the heart of French culture using the power of irony.