La Guerre sets out to discover, or perhaps to create, a mythology for the industrial environment. On the most flippant plane, in a Lévi-Straussian parody, a beautiful woman, Pal Mal, burns her golden hair, inhales the smoke, and behold the first cigarette. A black, chromeless limousine roams the autoroutes seeking whom it may devour, leaving Z-shaped tyre marks on the bodies of its victims. This is sheer whimsy, and for the most part not very good parody. It is symptomatic of the intent to see in all the manifestations of the consumer society a forest of symbols that can restore some kind of sub-conscious rapport between the city dweller and his environment.

There are some impressive moments. Béa B, the vehicle for the narrative, is picked up by a sinister car-load of maniacs who go manhunting in their saloon, running down pedestrians at night. The eerie episode is well told. Or she lies at the end of a runway while an aeroplane takes off over her head, recreating a primitive sense of awe before this thundering monster. M. Le Clézio is on less sure ground when he introduces, albeit in a minor key, themes such as Revolution in the modern city, motivated less by coherent political or social attitudes than a shapeless, mindless urge to fight and destroy, with no clear notion of what to rebuild afterwards.

He transposes this into a poetic generalization on the inevitability of violence in the face of a depersonalized all-embracing social machine, the faceless monster Monopol of one of his pseudo-myths. Not only do his generalizations remain as shapeless and mindless as the forces he is trying to evoke, but the confidence of the imagery and language wavers and degenerates into a rambling rhetoric. Similarly, invocations of the war in Vietnam ring hollow as they try to mingle political sectarianism with a poetic and esoteric vision of a new sensibility in a changing, violent world. This vision is much more telling when it is embodied in the many crisply recounted vignettes related to concrete features of the city. For example, Béa B walks through a canyon of skyscrapers, that encapsulate time itself, like walking through a stratified fossil bed.

La Guerre is "prophetic" in both senses of the term. It interprets the present in poetic terms and it foretells an imminent catastrophe. It abjures plot or characterization in favour of an inventory of city-symbols, imbued with an attempted antique animism. In the final analysis, therefore, it depends on the power of language and imagination: the themes themselves are patently unworkable. Awe, a sense of reverential fear, is not possible before a limousine or a Jumbo Jet, since their workings are known to us. As vehicles for a linguistic and imaginative tour de force, however, M. Le Clezio has demonstrated their possibilities as well as the inherent danger of rhetoric and fantasy.

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