When J. M. G. Le Clézio won the Prix Renaudot in 1963 with his first novel, Le Procès-verbal, and was acclaimed as the most promising new voice in French literature, the cultural establishment appeared to be playing one of its games. Here was the story of an outsider, an assault on the values of modern society; but with the inducement of a few plums, its talented author could probably be persuaded out of this stance of late-adolescent revolt.

Le Clézio was not to be seduced. He refused to be drawn into the Parisian literary scene (he now lives in New Mexico), and has remained a misfit among French writers, continuing to explore his unease with modern European society, increasingly from the point of view of the persecuted and the disinherited of the Third World. Most of his work in the past fifteen years has been on this theme, often using protagonists who are as far as possible from the author himself and his own immediate experience—the Moroccan girl in Désert, the Africans of Onitsha, the Jewish and Palestinian women of Étoile errante—as though the author felt the need to extend still further a consciousness already shaped by a heterogeneous family background (French, Breton, Irish), an unconventional upbringing (in the 1940s, his father worked as a doctor in Nigeria) and a life-time of travel.

The inspiration for his new novel came from a trip to Mauritius, a country with strong links to both France and England, and connections with Le Clézio's own family. His grandfather nearly emigrated there; but when he arrived at Flat Island, the small island off the coast which served as a staging-post for immigrants during the compulsory period of quarantine, he changed his mind and went back to Europe. The central and longest section of La Quarantaine is set on Flat Island and told by just such an immigrant in the last years of the nineteenth century: Léon has arrived here with his brother, a doctor, and his sister-in-law; but, instead of turning round and heading back to France, he falls in love with an Indian woman living on the island, gradually separates himself from the European settlers and disappears. His narrative is framed in accounts of how his grand-nephew in 1980 (the year when Le Clézio turned forty, suggesting another possible meaning of the title) sets out to find the trace of Léon and Suryavati, the woman he loved.

As well as the elements from Le Clézio's own family history, there are references to public events, particularly to the life of Arthur Rimbaud, whom the doctor, Jacques, is supposed to have glimpsed. Rimbaud is clearly an emblematic figure in the novel, as a misfit who rejects Europe and disappears into Africa, and one would expect Le Clézio to consider him an exemplary figure. His appearances in this novel are brief, but memorable.

So are the passages in which Léon describes the progress of his love for Suryavati, from the first chance meeting on the beach to the sexual consummation and Léon's gradual dissociation from his European family and colleagues. Eventually, at a key moment in the novel, he comes to renounce revenge against those who have tried to stand in the way of his passion:

La vérité est simple et belle, elle est dans la lumière qui étincelle sur les dalles de basalte dans la puissance de la mer, dans cette nuit illuminée le long de la baie des Palissades, comme un miroir de l'infini. Ce qui est vrai, c'est le visage très doux et ancien de cette femme.

Such lyrical passages teeter on the edge of banality, and in some of Le Clézio's earlier novels have toppled over it. But in La Quarantaine, he can get away with them, in the context of a strong and absorbing narrative. It is one of the best, as well as one of the most characteristic works we have had for some time from a notable outsider.