Scrabbling forlornly about on the outside of The Giants—a novel whose truculent bloatedness is the result of over-doses of anti-roman steroids—is a clearer, thinner, and much more recognisably simple-minded fiction. Called, say, The Unhidden Persuaders, its thesis, that the human race is being bombarded by advertisements propagated by industrial giants and their agency hacks, who don't care that they're killing language, doesn't sound too original—it isn't—so it's not allowed to interfere too much with Le Clézio's inflationary restatement of Vance Packard's familiar threnody. Instead, we're shoved inside Hyperpolis and its Supermarket, a world of invading vocables, a landscape of signs, invented by the commercial and political Masters, in which a girl called Tranquillity and a trolley-supervisor called Machines vainly struggle (à la Orwell, you might venture to suggest) for personality and relationship. Naturally, when Machines lights a fire in the Supermarket (a damp squib of a try at burning down Hyperpolis) he's arrested. His hapless struggle against the Masters much resembles the fiction's own forlorn tussle with the modish appurtenances (slogans, computer programmes, poems for machines) that in this novel trample old-fashioned stuff like plot and character into submission. The 'hero' is Dumb Bogo, a youth who, depressed at what the Masters are doing to human speech, has given up words for the language of pebbles and suchlike dazzling communicators. It does make an odd shift, however, this blaming all human speech, and urging the virtues of word-smashing dictionary-burning, and pebble-fancying just for the iniquities of some of language's practitioners.