When J. M. G. Le Clézio's Le Proces-Verbal appeared in 1963, it was at once acclaimed as the first work of an unusually gifted writer and awarded that year's Prix Renaudot. The origi­nality of its form might well have suggested the possibility of annexing Le Clézio as a recruit to the by then established tradition of the nouveau roman, conventional character and plot structure being evidently of negligible con­cern to him. Within the next few years, howev­er, after the appearance of L'Extase materielle and Terra amata, it became apparent that this writer's preoccupations had little or nothing to do with those of his immediate predecessors, and that such affinities as he had were more likely to link him with, for instance, Saint-Exupery or Giono. His narratives usually fea­ture the plight of the dispossessed or exploited, and often of current equivalents of the "noble savage", set against foregrounds suffused with a sense of elemental vastness and the contrast­ing opulence and austerity of nature.

The present tense seems to be more fre­quently employed by modern French novelists than by their British or American counterparts; but few contemporary writers can have resorted to it so consistently as Le Clézio. Concomitant with his absorption in a continuous present is an impulse to unrestrained exten­sion. "Comme il est long, le temps de la mer!" exclaims the narrator of his latest novel, the Mauritian Alexis L'Estang, resuming his obsessive search for pirate gold in the Indian Ocean on returning from service in the tren­ches of the First World War. His story begins in 1892, when he is eight, and spans thirty years; yet despite the dates, the novel is in no sense a historical one, but could be most fittingly described as a fable. Its characters are of quasi-archetypal simplicity, and they communicate in dialogue of taciturn breviloquence. Apart from the narrator's abiding but tenuous relationship with his sister Laure, the novel's principal human interest centres on his chastely erotic idyll with Ouma, the young native girl or "manaf" he finds on the island of Rodrigues, to which plans left him by his father have led him in search of a hoard of plundered gold concealed there by a legendary corsair. Ouma is an archetype of the order of W. H. Hudson's Rima, or Rider Haggard's "Nada the Lily" (referred to early in the book as the heroine of the favourite reading-matter of Alexis and his sister).

Le Chercheur d'or has much in common with Le Clézio's previous novel, Desert, which had a tribal child of nature as heroine, and con­trasted the sandy wastes of North Africa with corrupt Marseilles in the same way as the Indian Ocean here counterbalances the killing fields of Flanders. In both books the distinction between the historical time gauged by civiliza­tion and the primordial time of legend and myth is implicitly drawn. Le Chercheur d'or incorporates a number of elements of cosmic symbolism, such as the chalta in the garden of the protagonist's family, which he and his sister designate "the tree of good and evil", and the cyclone which represents the deluge bringing the paradisiac period of their childhood to a close. Alexis is almost as obsessed with the constellations of Sirius and the Southern Cross as he is with chimerical hidden gold. He thinks of the ship that eventually takes him to the supposed treasure island of Rodrigues as the Argo, while the caverns he devotes himself to locating belong to the traditional pattern of initiation; a pattern which provides the primary motivation of the whole tale.

Le Clézio's aloofness from Paris and consis­tent indifference to its literary modes and man­oeuvres prompt speculation regarding the nature of his readership. Ten years ago, in an enquiry into the poor health of contemporary literature, Julien Gracq expressed his aversion to stifling novels crammed with sour and ex­asperated specimens of humanity, "into which one enters as into a metro carriage at six in the evening", and deplored the tendency of writers to compound the exclusion of what he defined as "the human plant". It may well be supposed that Le Clézio's readers find his work attractive because, while scarcely distinguished by con­cern with the invention of individual "characters" in the conventional sense, it expresses an unusual sensibility towards a dimension where­in human beings can breathe naturally in response to the seasonal rhythms of the planet, and thereby recover some hope of achieving ultimate wholeness and serenity.

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