J. M. G. Le Clézio's novel The Giants, translated by Simon Watson Taylor, begins with a chapter-long Marcusian tirade on illusory freedoms and real tyrannies. In the visionary episode which follows we are shown Hyperpolis, the hypermarket which dominates an anonymous, devitalized city. The huge domed structure has become the centre of a relentlessly commercial civilization. It warps everything to its enforced patterns of consumerism, nets everything in its closed-circuit systems of public address and observation. At times the image of Hyperpolis is surreal, at others almost documentary. And despite The Giants' unremitting loftiness of manner one often suspects that chauvinist outrage against the encroachments of the American supermarket on peculiarly French traditions is its underlying motivation. (This kind of protest is perhaps less resonant with the Anglo-Saxon public, who rarely conceive of the way they shop and eat as being culturally important.)

Oracular denunciation is a prominent feature of the novel: nine of the twenty-four sections are devoted to it. A substantial part of what remains is taken up with typographic montage illustrating the bombardment of sensibility by neon signs, advertisements, stock-market lists, supermarket soundtracks, headlines and computer printouts. These phantasmagoric interludes are persuasively witty, as indeed they need to be since it is their expense, presumably, which accounts for a novel of moderate length costing nearly £6. Intermittent narrative passages take up about half the novel. The chief named characters are Tranquillity, a slave worker, Dumb Bogo, a mute Hyperpolitan parasite, and Machines, a trolley attendant. All three, though neutered and dwarfish, are rebels. Tranquillity conspires with Machines in his project to burn down Hyperpolis; and despite the investigations of the security corps, we understand that Machines finally succeeds.

The Giants has the cultivated brilliance which one associates, rightly or wrongly, with prize-winning French novelists. Composition and verbal varnish are very much in evidence. What is surprising is the simplicity of the novel's message – it's even surprising that such a work should have a message at all. Hyperpolis itself is a naive conception: in The Space Merchants Pohl and Kornbluth with a far more primitive technique managed a much more complex forecast of commercial trends. But the power of The Giants lies in its combination of stylistic virtuosity and political urgency. Novels which are both angry and artistically ambitious are rare: even rarer, perhaps, a novel of this kind which can be said to succeed, as this one to a large extent does.

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