Desert

It is fair to say that the award of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature to Jean-Marie Le Clézio came as something of a surprise to the French literary public and probably the author himself. This is not because Le Clézio did not deserve it (he was rumoured to be a possible laureate in 2006) but because, more simply, he has always been a writer at the margins of French intellectual life.

This is reflected in his background and his itinerary. He holds dual Franco-Mauritian nationality and has a British father. He has spent much of his life outside France – he was brought up partly in Nigeria, studied at Bristol University and has lived in Mexico, Africa, America and the Far East.

This itinerant life has produced work which is of variable quality but always fascinating.

He writes mainly about restless drifters, misfits and the complex civilisations of the non-European world. He laments the encroachment of technology and industry into the planet’s few remaining wild places and is discreetly hostile to the Parisian literary establishment (he lives mainly in Nice).

Yet for all this, Le Clézio is a bestseller in France. This is partly because his tales have epic and exotic qualities which make him an enduring if often uneven read.

It is also partly because he writes with a moral seriousness and engagement which many had thought had been lost forever in contemporary French literature. Indeed, he is in many ways the antidote to the callow cynicism of fashionable writers such as Michel Houellebecq. Le Clézio is, in contrast, a return to the tradition of Albert Camus (another Nobel laureate and non-Parisian) who insisted that the writer has a duty to make ethical decisions based on lived experience rather than theory. This is certainly un-Parisian if it is not entirely un-French.

Desert was first published in France in 1980 but is only now, in the wake of Le Clézio’s Nobel Prize, being made available in English. Fittingly, the story takes place in the Sahara and Marseilles – places which are both at a considerable remove from the intellectual claustrophobia of Paris. The novel is constructed as a pair of matching narratives. The first of these is set in 1909-1910 and tells the story of a tribe of Tuaregs who are forced to migrate across the Moroccan Sahara to escape their Spanish and French colonial masters, who are spreading their control through the area. The second, no less gripping narrative, is the story of Lalla, a refugee from Morocco, who travels to Marseilles at some unfixed point after the second world war. Inevitably she is intimidated and brutalised by her encounter with the European city and casually abused by its predatory inhabitants.

The most striking aspect of the novel is the manner in which Le Clézio captures the emptiness of the desert and the way it shapes human souls and destiny. The descriptions of this landscape, mostly in the words of a small boy, Nour, are vivid and intense and contain also a kind of religious meaning. For the Tuaregs who live in this place far from civilisation, life has an immediacy which cannot be found elsewhere. God, or the universe, is revealed to them through the details of everyday life: eating, praying or the act of sex.

But this is no simple parable of the nobility of primitive beings. Tuareg society, as we discover, is complex and nuanced; it is a culture in the truest sense of the term; that is to say an accumulation of knowledge and meanings defined by a family or tribe. It is this collective identity that is fragile and under threat from the colonisers.

The sense of a community is the very opposite of what Lalla finds in Marseilles, which is confusing and incoherent – for Le Clézio, the very definition of a European city. Lalla’s story is not just about economic migration but about moving across and through cultures. She finally finds work, if not redemption, as a fashion model.

The real story of Desert is the history of the French Protectorate as seen from the point of view of those whose voices went unheard during the colonial period. It is an obvious paradox that these voices are now articulated in the language of an educated and cosmopolitan Frenchman. But this does not detract from the elegance and power of the style, nor the fact that both of these stories of displacement and exile are both timely and prophetic.

The fact that it has taken so long for Desert to appear in English is mainly due to waning interest in French literature on the UK side of the Channel rather than any intrinsic political or literary flaws. This is one of Le Clézio’s major works and, despite the novel’s relative antiquity, it stands up remarkably well to 21st-century scrutiny. Most crucially, it reveals the history of colonial France in the Arab world as a deep-layered series of narratives which have yet to be properly understood in France or, indeed, the wider world.

Professor Andrew Hussey is dean of the University of London Institute in Paris

Review by Andrew Hussey Desert By JMG Le Clézio Translated by C Dickson Atlantic Books £16.99, 368 pages FT Bookshop price: £13.59