Paradise before the guns opened fire

Reviewing recently a new English version of Alain-Fournier’s 1913 novel Le Grand Meaulnes, I was happy and relieved to find that it retains its magic. It has entranced generations of adolescents, not all of them French, but I had wondered if it would still appeal after so many years. It is an extraordinary book, part fairytale or romance, part realistic study of French provincial life, sometimes grim, in the last years of the 19th century; and some of its fascination comes from this curiously hybrid quality. It is both naive and knowing. It has the dewy freshness of a first novel, but it is also admirably constructed, reminding one that Alain-Fournier, though only 26 when the novel appeared, was no provincial innocent, but already belonged to the literary establishment. His closest friend (and brother-in-law) Jacques Rivière became editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française, and Alain-Fournier himself knew Gide and his circle.

Part of its attraction for us is doubtless the picture it presents of rural France before it had felt any of the shock of modernity. Yet it is Meaulnes’s discovery of ‘the lost estate’ (the title given to this new translation) and his attempt to find his way back to this briefly-experienced paradise — this glimpse of Eden — that gives the novel its peculiar and enduring charm, and it struck me on this reading that, thoroughly and engagingly French as it is, it belongs very much to its period. The main action may be set in the 1890s, but the atmosphere is also that of the golden Edwardian afternoon.

One finds the same sort of feeling in much that was written this side of the Channel, even, for example, The Wind in the Willows. The chapter entitled ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and that one in which Mole is lost and terrified in the Wild Wood, have the same other-worldly atmosphere. Kipling