J. M. G. Le Clézio's novel The Giants, translated by Simon Watson Taylor, begins with a chapter-long Marcusian tirade on illusory freedoms and real tyrannies. In the visionary episode which follows we are shown Hyperpolis, the hypermarket which dominates an anonymous, devitalized city. The huge domed structure has become the centre of a relentlessly commercial civilization. It warps everything to its enforced patterns of consumerism, nets everything in its closed-circuit systems of public address and observation.

What is surprising is the simplicity of the novel's message – it's even surprising that such a work should have a message at all. Hyperpolis itself is a naive conception: in The Space Merchants Pohl and Kornbluth with a far more primitive technique managed a much more complex forecast of commercial trends. But the power of The Giants lies in its combination of stylistic virtuosity and political urgency. Novels which are both angry and artistically ambitious are rare: even rarer, perhaps, a novel of this kind which can be said to succeed, as this one to a large extent does.