Desert by JMG Le 0Clézio,
translation by C Dickson (Atlantic)
Despite having published more than 40 books, JMG Le Clézio remains an enigma for most English-speaking readers. Published in France in 1980, Desert was singled out by the Swedish Academy as his “definitive breakthrough as a novelist” in its Nobel Prize citation. Now, with this work translated into English, the opportunity arises to unpick something of the mystery of a writer who has always been concerned with journeys and adventures, especially those undertaken by the dispossessed.
Though by and large it leaves behind the experimentalism of his early career, Desert continues Le Clézio’s preoccupation with migrations. The novel is told from two viewpoints, in a double time scheme. On the one hand is Nour, a Tuareg boy who finds himself part of an uprising against encroaching French colonists that took place in North Africa between 1910 and 1912. On the other is Lalla, a striking and indomitable orphan girl descended from the same blue-robed clan as Nour. She grows up on the coast of Morocco during some unspecified time after World War II — perhaps the 1970s — before travelling to France.
Nour marches with the followers of the seer Sheikh Ma al-Ainine (“Water of the Eyes”), first to the city of Smara in Spanish Sahara, then north to Morocco. Initially proud, the rebels are worn down by betrayals and setbacks. As the colonial troops close in on them, they run out of food and water: “Each day people edged a little further into despair and anger, and Nour felt his throat growing tighter. He thought of the Sheikh’s distant gaze drifting out over the invisible hills in the night, then coming to rest on him for a brief moment, like a flash in a mirror that lit him up inside.”
Eventually the Sheikh’s warriors are massacred by French troops: the fact that most of the soldiers who attack the Tuaregs are Senegalese serves to point out one of the main themes of the novel, which is the compromising encounter of traditional societies with the brute forces of mechanised imperialism.
For a while, Lalla, living with her aunt and uncle in a shanty, is able to put off the confrontation with modernity. She spends most of her time up on the dunes, communing with the seabirds in a harsh, bleak landscape. Also there is the spectral figure of the Blue Man. El Ser (“the secret”), as she calls him, stands for what has been lost — he is a cultural memory flashing in her mind’s eye just as, in the other story, the Sheikh’s gaze does in Nour’s.
The nearest Lalla comes to happiness is through her friendship with a wild boy called the Hartani (a disparaging Arabic name for black oasis-dwellers), who himself was abandoned at a nearby well by one of the blue men and now works as a shepherd: “He stands there on one leg like that, motionless in the sun, the other foot resting on his calf just under the knee, and he gazes out into the distance, over where the reflections are dancing in the air, over in the direction of the herd of goats and sheep.”
The developing romance between Lalla and the Hartani is one of the most moving parts of this inspiring but patchy novel. Her attraction to him partly relates to their both being parentless, but it is also concerned with his deep connection with nature.
“It was here — in the barren order of the desert — where everything was possible, where one walked shadowless on the edge of his own death. The blue men moved along the invisible trail towards Smara, freer than any creature in the world could be.”
Threatened with an arranged marriage, Lalla flees into the desert with the Hartani and then, after a period in hospital, travels to Marseilles to look for work. Almost penniless, enduring the hardships of immigrant life, she finds employment as a cleaner before being taken up by a fashion photographer. For a moment she is famous, but she is not interested in money or renown.
The elemental lyricism of this book sometimes tips over into bathos. It will not be to everyone’s taste. Perhaps Le Clézio’s celebrity in France has something to do with the distinctiveness of his style when set against the austere formalism of much post-war French literary fiction.
How he plays elsewhere relates to translation and there are issues with Desert in that regard. But his achievement is not simply a matter of language; it is also to do with his chosen subject matter, in which he has long been more adventurous than his peers, in his own country and elsewhere. Thirty years ago, when this book was first published, migration and separation from the natural world were pressing social problems. Now these issues have become critical globally. The academicians voted in Le Clézio’s favour as much for this wide engagement as for his prose, which is often uneven. They will also have been impressed by three of his other novels, which many consider superior to this, Le Chercheur d’Or, Onitsha and Révolutions. Until these are easily accessible in English, it seems likely that this remarkable writer will continue to mystify. —