9 JUNE 2007, Page 38

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 Riviere became editor of the Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 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 offers it too in Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies, while, wholly different in setting and narrative as it may be, his masterpiece Kim resembles Le Grand Meaulnes in its suggestion that the truths perceived in childhood and adolescence have a vivid reality deriving from the sense of wonder which will grow dim with the passing of the years. Moreover Kim, like Meaulnes, is uncertain of his identity: 'Who is Kim — Kim — Kim?' he asks. And then there is Peter Pan.

But perhaps the Edwardian writer whose work at times most evidently breathes the same spirit as Alain-Fournier's is Saki, in stories such as 'The Music on the Hill' and 'The Hounds of Fate'.

Stonor heard his adopted name called in a tone of strained anxiety. Instantly he knew that something untoward had happened, and with a quick revulsion of outlook his sanctuary became in his eyes a place of peace and contentment, from which he dreaded to be driven.

As with Alain-Fournier, Said suggests that — the truth about things — is there, only to be glimpsed, the other side of a veil; that there is an Eden which we may visit in youth but from which we must be expelled in later years.

Describing Signorelli's painting 'The Triumph of Pan', the Franco-American writer Julien Green (born 1900) found that a shadow hung over these enigmatic festivities. Such a look of languor on the face of Pan detached him from paganism. If he ruled over these bodies, he did so in the late afternoon light; the mood was joyful, but dusk was approaching.

If this seems to catch the atmosphere of that time, catch indeed something of the mood of Le Grand Meaulnes, it is no doubt in part because of our awareness now of how that world was to be shattered by the guns that opened fire in August 1914, after which it was no longer possible to believe in Eden — or indeed in Pan or Puck; still less in any innocence.

Writing in 1947 an introduction to Saki's novel, The Unbearable Bassington, Evelyn Waugh found it 'impossible in reading [it] ... at this date to avoid a prophetic and allegori- cal interpretation which cannot have been consciously present to the author. It was 1912. Comus' — an Arcadian name, one may note — tad only to wait two years to find full employment for his talents. He was cannon- fodder in a time of peace.' Said himself was killed in the trenches in November 1916. Alain-Fournier went earlier, in the first weeks of the war. One can't doubt that Le Grand Meaulnes himself died at the Marne or Verdun. Between 1914 and 1918 the paradis- al lost estate was lost. The wind no longer blew through the willows and Pook's Hill was deserted. 'To die,' said Peter, 'will be an awfully big adventure.' It became the com- mon experience of millions of young men, and their successors; those whom Gertrude Stein called `the lost generation' were exiled from Alain-Fournier's lost estate. Only the magic of art — his art and that of others — enables us to imagine it. Allan Massie