Désert

Le Clézio's novel is an account of a Berber people in West Africa from their defeat by the French just before WWI up to the late twentieth century. The narrative switches from a large-canvas story of the last months of the tribe wandering in the Western Sahara to a modern tale of one of the descendents, a girl called Lalla. Displaced from their wells to the south by French troops from Senegal, the tribe has to embark on a long march to the north in the fruitless search for a new homeland. The novelist paints a large, geographical canvas of a people in their desert environment, with their own Muslim religion based in the Lawrentian earth. The second strand of the book sees Lalla, a young girl living in a coastal shanty town, going out regularly to the dunes along the coast and renewing the primal relationship with the landscape. She subsequently travels to Marseilles, having become pregnant by a nomadic goatherd; we then get a nightmare vision of the teeming immigrant slums of Marseilles from her point of view. In the novel's least convincing section, Lalla is adopted by a photographer and gains celebrity as a model - while still pregnant - only to leave the celebrity lifestyle all of a sudden to return to her shanty town to give birth.  In counterpoint to this we get the final battle between the Berber tribe and the French army outside Agadir, a hopeless assault by desert tribemen against machine guns from Europe. 

   Wilfred Thesiger's book on the arabs of the Arabian peninsula, Arabian Sands, contains a similar account of a warlike, nomadic people at the end of their history. Le Clezio's book has a romantic element which refuses to see the people's heritage as doomed: Lalla gives birth under a totemic fig tree to a child destined to carry forward her atavistic bond with her origins. 

J.M.G. Le Clézio

C'était comme s'il n'y avait pas de noms, ici, comme s'il n'y avait pas de paroles. Le désert lavait tout dans son vent, effaçait tout. Les hommes avaient la liberté de l'espace dans leur regard, leur peau était pareille au métal. La lumière du soleil éclatait partout.

 Désert (1985)

Red Deer in the Nephins

The evenings are drawing in now, so if we wanted to watch for deer at dusk we needed to get away by five. My companion and I drove north from Castlebar, out onto the flat country that extends east from the Nephin Beg range. This was originally part of the great bog of Erris; nowadays it's a patchwork of forestry plantation, reclaimed pastures and cutaway bog.

   We parked at the end of a minor road and set out across the bog track, low fields to our right, a scattered plantation of lodgepole pine to our left. Deer prints were visible on the mud of the track among the sheep marks. Then we heard the first braying, well off in the distance. To stalk this animal we would have to leave the road and rough it through the deep heather of the plantation. A pair of ravens were calling and tussling above us, the wing beats like the chuffing sound of a steam train. 

   The stag called again. Then a movement in the undergrowth close by announced another animal, a hind with two calves from last year, twins possibly. The female watched steadily, unable to make up her mind about us, and eventually disappeared over the ridge.   

   We selected a group of trees on a knoll as our main vantage point. This was wonderful terrain for deer, scattered trees with clearings and denser stands of pines. My companion called to the rutting stag, imitating the deep tone to perfection. After a pause, the stag called again, then another called from a point closer, to our left, then a third from the right, and finally, a fourth call came from the thick plantation at our backs. We were surrounded now. The animal to our left produced a short, gruff bark to express its annoyance. 

   Although the braying was close, within 100 metres, we could not see any of these stags. I moved back slowly to try to glimpse the animal that had begun to sound behind us, and as I did so we noticed that the breeze, which had been imperceptible, had now picked up slightly from the east. This must have explained why the three animals ahead of us fell silent. They had caught wind of us - a phrase which now found its true meaning for me.

   In the thickening dusk we floundered through the heather back to the track. One of the local farmers, inexperienced in these matters, had erected an extraordinary fence to try to protect his hardwood plantings from the deer; hopelessly ineffective, it would look better in the Tate Modern as a installation of wires, poles, and white tape, homage to Beuys.

The last brood

These swallows were in the porch up to ten days ago. Then they left. Two nights later, two returned to roost for the last time. Now they have left for good. 

Credit Crunch at Ballygarvaun

Panning for gold,

The house unsold.