The vacant Michel has inherited money from an unloved father, but still works as a minor cultural bureaucrat (cue some deft gags on Tracey Emin-style conceptual art). His first trip to Thailand not only unveils the delights of hostess bars, but hitches him up with the dynamic, yet geisha-like, Val?e.Houellebecq inspects her professional milieu – of trend-surfing tourism – with a devastatingly keen eye. He mingles solid research with a wealth of sly comic touches. When her bosses swallow Michel's proposal to turn their ailing Club Med-style resorts into discreet brothels, they sigh with relief.

The skin trade means "no more salaries to be paid to registered pediatric nurses or windsurfing instructors; nor to specialists in ikebana, ceramics or painting on silk".Michel, the archetypal consumer, devours airport novels. (He hates John Grisham, but admires The Beach.) And, along with its erotic escapades and metaphysical excursions, Platform delivers the low-down on a glitzy but rotten global trade. This level of insider detail one usually finds only in mass-market fictive operators such as ... well, a certain Mr Forsyth.More surprisingly, the novel doesn't merely run on irony and rancour. Michel's rat-on-a-wheel Paris routine plangently captures the melancholy of sex-saturated consumer culture, with its victims trapped "like insects in lumps of amber". Later, Houellebecq grants the glittering Thai landscapes of beach and jungle an almost innocent splendour.

He pays homage, as "a child of Europe, of worry and of shame", to the body-friendly Buddhism that shaped the local life. And, in their escape into the flesh, he even allows Michel and Val?e genuine tenderness: "In the absence of love, nothing can be sanctified".It all ends in blood and tears, as we expect. Islamic terrorism erupts here as a vague deus ex machina, or even as a self-induced punishment for washed-up Europeans who "reek of selfishness, masochism and death". As mutilated foreign lechers lie in the wreckage of their bombed sex club, Michel hears "the genuine screams of the damned".Perhaps that phrase just slipped out, unwittingly Perhaps not. Anyone on nodding terms with the history of French literary outrage knows what can happen to its dandies and demons. Historically, their road of excess often leads out of the "tragic age" of narcissism and nihilism – and directly to the altar.