Epic journey

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The sand, the stones, the sky, the sun, the silence, the suffering, is the realm of JMG Le Clezio's 1980 novel Desert, which tells of the epic journey of a North African tribe driven from their lands by French invaders during World War I. Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008, JMG Le Clezio, France's 'nomad novelist', was hailed by the Swedish Academy as an "author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy" and it is the first time that Desert, described as his "definitive breakthrough as a novelist", is available in an English translation (by C Dickson).To describe Desert as a powerful novel would be to state the obvious. Though told through the eyes of Nour, a young boy from the tribe of the Blue Men, and a girl called Lalla, a descendent from the same tribe, the protagonists of the novel are clearly the Desert and the City. Pitted against each other are the elements and the civilisation superimposed upon them by the steady and destructive onslaught of man. While Nour watches fascinated as his tribe trudges through the unforgiving desert sand to seek refuge with the Great Sheik (Ma Ainine "water of the eyes"), the orphan Lalla gives in to the secrets of the desert, letting them lead her away from her colourless life at The Project (a lifeless heap of metal sheet shacks where "everyone is very poor but no one complains"). Her secret life is peopled by the likes of al Ser, the Blue Man of the Desert whose gaze protects her, the shepherd Hartani who she "speaks to in a different way than with words" and Naman the fisherman, who can tell a story about almost anything.It is in the latter half of the book that the threats posed by civilisation really close in on the narrative. Lalla flees to Marseilles and is swallowed up by the City and the might of the Great Sheik cannot protect the tribe from the Christian invaders, the French and Spanish colonisers.Le Clezio is unrelenting in his critique of civilisation as we know it and allows us no escape from his searing prose. "She didn't really know what fear was before, because back there in Hartani's land there were only snakes or scorpions or at worst, evil spirits making shadowy motions in the night, but here it's the fear of emptiness, of need, of hunger."Equally unnerving if a lot more awed, as if to surrender to the elements was but natural for man, are his descriptions of the shadow of death in the desert. "Sometimes there would be a shape of a body in the dust, arms and legs drawn in, as if it were asleep. It was an old man or woman, that the pain and exhaustion had stopped there, by the side of the trail, struck in the back of the head as if with a hammer, the bodyalready dessicated."The historical background of the First World War is but a shadow in what is essentially Le Clezio's quest to pin down the dislocation, of the body and spirit. True to its mirage-like haunting quality, the structure of the narrative flits back and forth essentially between different states of mind bound by a common legacy.Le Clezio, who describes himself as an 'exile' who travels extensively and was exposed to myriad cultures and traditions, is clearly a man on a mission and Desert a book with its own rhythm.It is Le Clezio's ability to turn out gut-wrenching prose in service of his conviction that holds the key to appreciating the novel, irrespective of whether you agree with his bleak view of the future man has fashioned for himself. Once one gets past the mood-laden descriptive beginning and attunes themselves to the lack of a linear narrative, in Desert, the journey really is everything.

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