["The Giants"] is thoroughly benign, an undeniably stylish but overlong and glib exhortation to the world to wake up and Be Free. It seems that those superannuated ogres, the hidden persuaders, are still at work, and they reappear here as the Masters of Thought or the Masters of Words, keeping us all down by thinking our thoughts for us. Le Clézio's call to arms against them has the form of a parable, though not much crystallizes from his indefatigable prose by way of a location or a narrative. We are in, or around, a brightly-lit cement dystopia called Hyperpolis, something like a giant supermarket full of shambling, zombie-like consumers. The few characters are so underdeveloped they are almost translucent and have whimsically parabolic names like Tranquility, Machines and Dumb Bogo, an urchin who is a kind of hero because he either can't or won't talk.

Not to talk in Hyperpolis is to be free, because it means you are no longer mouthing the thoughts fed into you by the omnipotent corporations and their advertising agents. But Le Clézio … writes too richly or blandly to endow Hyperpolis with the necessary unpleasantness, and his human figures are far too dim to be sympathetic. Actually, Hyperpolis hardly seems worth running away from. The translation, it so happens, is extraordinarily good—rather wasted on a lazy book such as this.