This is an interesting book. In one sense not much happens—there is very little dialogue and the locales of action shift in chunks of time—but in another sense much happens to the protagonist, through whose eyes we experience the story. In this respect, I would quibble with the translation of the title; in the original French, the book was called Le Chercheur d’or ; chercheur can be translated as prospector, but I would argue that in English “prospector” has a fairly narrow connotation tied to mineral exploration, and this is misleading in the context of this book; Alexis L’Etang is more of a searcher than a prospector, and though an obsession with finding buried treasure occupies a fair bit of the story, in the end, Alexis is searching for much more than that, although it takes him a long time to realize it himself: he is searching for meaning in his life which is something far more precious and far more elusive than gold.

The story opens in 1892 on the island of Mauritius when Alexis is about eight years old: “As far back as I can remember I have listened to the sea: to the sound of it mingling with the wind in the filao needles, the wind that never stops blowing….It is the sound that cradled my childhood. I can hear it now, deep inside me; it will come with me wherever I go…” . The last lines of the book are: “Now night has fallen. To the depths of my being I hear the living sound of the rising sea.” Although most of the action takes place on land, the sea is a centerpiece of this book, the sea as a living, eternal thing that can be beautiful and sublime and then dark, dangerous and destructive; the latter sense always lurking, always potential in even the calmest days; it can serve mankind as a conduit for transportation, as a link for far-flung places and a source of food and sustenance for millions, but it can never be subjugated; the sea breathes through the unchanging, regular rhythms of its tides, just as a man breathes for life, and this sense of a slowness, a regularity of breath permeates the very writing and telling of this story.

The bare bones of the story are easily given: Alexis lives with his sister, Laure, and their parents in an isolated house on the island of Mauritius, a bucolic, idyllic existence of sun and sea, exploration, home teaching by a loving mother, a benevolent but often absent father bent on his schemes that will ultimately see his bankruptcy and the eviction of the family to poverty in a nearby town. Upon the death of his father, Alexis takes to the sea and an island where he is convinced (a passion of his father’s) that there is a buried treasure for which he has the map if he can figure out the clues. This occupies Alexis for some years, during which time he meets Ouma, a beautiful young woman from a local indigenous people who live isolated in the mountains and shun contact; Ouma herself has an interesting history as she lived for some years in France before returning to the island. Alexis does not find the pirate’s treasure; he joins the army in 1914 and serves in the trenches with distinction; returns home to his sister and mother, but is always drawn to finding Ouma again…and perhaps I won’t spoil the rest of the plot for those who might like to read it for themselves.

There is a powerful description of a hurricane that destroys the country home and hastens the departure of the family, and other descriptions of raging storms on land and at sea—but there is, in a sense, something clean in the naturalness of destruction by nature, as opposed to the obscene destructiveness of manmade slaughters such as the trenches of WWI. In this story nature is always the final refuge, the repository of what is good and clean and individual; almost all contacts with society or civilization are marked by greed, racism, struggles, bloody conflicts; the “reality” of the world keeps imposing whether through class struggles, economic disasters, epidemics, institutionalized racism ,and try as they might, neither Alexis nor Ouma, in the end, can continue to live in their splendid isolation.

This is a story about Alexis’s search for himself. It begins with his mad quest for the pirate gold which he thinks will close the circle with his dead father: “…everything at last will be put in order. I am finally going to fulfill the dream my father had for so long, the one that kept him searching and which haunted my childhood. My father’s will, not my own, must be carried out…I left to put an end to the dream, so that my life might begin…I know I will find something.” What he finds, eventually, is that life paths cannot be predicted or foreseen or controlled; he becomes estranged from his beloved sister, not out of malice, but because, “I suddenly realize that in the course of my years of exile I lost her. She has followed another path and become someone else; our lives no longer coincide.” It is the more pragmatic, more realistic Laure who tells Alexis: “It’s no good wanting what no longer exists.”

In the end, although Alexis has a clearer idea of life and what he can expect from it, he learns that there is no endpoint, there is only constant looking and experiencing of life, and for him, that means a return to the sea: “We’ll go to the other side of the earth, to a place where we need fear neither signs in the sky nor the wars of men. Now night has fallen. To depths of my being I hear the living sound of the rising sea.”