[In the following excerpt from their full-length study of contemporary French novelists, Brée and Guiton note that Giono is unlike most of his literary contemporaries in his preference for isolated rural settings and his visionary themes.]

Jean Giono's native province is not far distant from [Henri] Bosco's, a little more to the north, a little further to the east; yet nothing could be more different than the use these two writers make of their setting. Giono's universe is animated to the point of agitation. Everything in his novels is in motion, and everyone is engaged in some precise action. Born in the Alpes Maritimes, Giono likes to situate his tales, not in his native village of Manosque, but in the distant hills, sparsely populated plateaux and isolated villages beyond his immediate reach. There he can more easily set up a world untouched as yet by any modern conveniences, even a post office. His universe, like that of Bosco, is self-sufficient; he peoples it with a race of men that only by error can be looked upon as existing outside his books. These people are not peasants; they exist apart from the rest of humanity, one and all varieties of a single species. They are Giono's noble race of man. Engaged in their own forms of living, they are free, free to start out at a moment's notice on the adventures suggested to them by their creator—a great quality in the eyes of a novel reader. It is quite clear from the outset that they are entirely conventional, just as conventional as the Shepherds of Arcadia and, in their own way, just as appealing.

Giono's fictional output is enormous and it shows no signs of flagging. His development as a storyteller has been continuous, but the basic conventions he uses have not changed. The Provençal landscape furnishes him with the materials of his world. But he molds it, enlarges it, detaches it from reality, empties it of its essentially civilized character, and fills it to overflowing with elements taken from his own imagination. The hills of Provence become mountains, the streamlets become rivers, the bouquets of trees turn to forests. And the wind blows, the stars shine, on the immense space of a new, unrecognizable planet made for Giono's race of men as never at any time our earth was made for us.

The visionary quality of this décor is almost lost because of Giono's almost childish delight in anthropomorphic description. No tree in Giono—and they are there by the hundred—no stream of water, no small seed, no large glacier, fails to vibrate with human feeling. The transfer is solemnly made. Everyone in Giono's novels must approach every phenomenon of nature as if it were humanly animated; so persistent is this trait that the grandeur of Giono's natural world often gives way to a sort of crowded fussiness. We lack air, so concretely busy is the wind, so intent on its affairs. A strong sense of the great cosmic flow of life presides over the genesis of Giono's tales, but all too often he is content to express it by way of a monotonous, pervasive and all too simple animism.

The human beings and the human communities that live on Giono's planet have unusual powers of communication with all the natural phenomena around them. They are really one with their environment, and, like Giono himself, they merely say in words what the universe says in a variety of ways. Their language, like their earth, like themselves, is highly conventionalized. The conventions are perfectly acceptable as such. Giono's men and women live a life that is neither essentially rural, nor subject to any of the hardships of peasant existence. Giono has settled them in small self-sufficient communities, or so-called farms, but they are really adventurers—adventurers who live rather like a confident crew on a ship on the high seas, attentive to the atmosphere, to the wind, to the water. They have no use for instruments such as the thermometer or the barometer because they know with an awesome immediacy exactly what nature is doing around them. They are simple, strong men and women who live naturally off the earth. Giono concedes that they occasionally must plow, but even then they are more likely to be seen plowing at night because the beauty of the stars has moved them.

Giono's men, in short, are poets, and their great adventures are quite simply and romantically love adventures, newly and sumptuously orchestrated from without by all the beauty of an unpolluted “natural” universe. Man, in his innocence, his oneness with nature, first stands alone with his fellow men. When he has found the woman who must by some mysterious necessity be his companion, he attains his full stature. He builds a house, sows grain, and lives with Biblical simplicity, a free man in full possession of the “true riches” of life, an enviable man indeed if we compare his realm to our world of social interdependence, military conscription, radio and television, international tensions and bureaucratic complications.

When Giono's first novel Colline (Hill of Destiny) appeared in 1929, it struck a fresh, new note. The very conventions within which Giono works were a welcome relief to a reading public weary of the sophistication and complexities of the all too prolific novel of the 1920's. After Proust and Gide, Duhamel and Romains, Cocteau and Giraudoux, what could be more restful than a world of wind and sun and simple men who apparently had never heard of psychological analysis, never confronted any social problems, never read any books. Giono had been preceded in this vein by the Swiss novelist Ramuz. But Ramuz was more somber, less optimistic than was Giono.

For Giono the world of his imagination was undoubtedly a refuge, as it was for many of his contemporaries. Brought up by his father, a shoemaker, in the small town of Manosque, Giono, except for one brief interval, had never left home before 1914. From his father, whom he loved, he learned to respect the solid virtues of the poor but independent artisan. He read the Bible with his father and later, in the free hours left him by his job as a bank clerk, discovered the classics, in translation. He read Sophocles and Homer, whose tales, as he says, he could find “unchanged” in his own province. Later on Melville—at least Melville's Moby Dick—also stirred his imagination, and Whitman moved him deeply. These combined influences could not fail to develop his epic imagination. Perhaps it is because Giono discovered these books for himself that they brought him only what he could best grasp, their visual qualities, beyond which he does not seem to have penetrated. It is to Homer, rather than to Sophocles, that he turns and, in Homer, to the Odyssey rather than the Iliad.

When in 1914, Giono, a boy of nineteen, was sent to the front with the infantry, he was totally unprepared. Four years later, when release came, his revolt was complete; he fled from the modern world and banished it from his novels. In a sense they are the antithesis of the reality he had experienced. Giono was soon to confuse fiction with fact and to build his imaginative constructions into an ethics wherein pain and suffering were cut down to his own scale. He accepted the role of prophet, a prophet who, like many others of his kind, had not been able to come to terms with reality. That happiness lies in a simple life and complete communication with nature is a common illusion, a dream to which we cling in our desire to recreate, like Bosco's characters, the Garden of Eden on this earth. As a serious intellectual and ethical message, the belief falls a little short. Giono was particularly well fitted to make literary capital out of it, however: so real is his love of his native province, so vivid his sensuous perceptions, so strong his imaginative powers. And he knows how to tell a story.

His first trilogy, Colline, Un de Baumugnes (Lovers Are Never Losers), 1929, and Regain (Harvest), 1930, is made up of three short novels. Colline is an account of the death of an old peasant, Janet. Janet, by evoking the hidden forces of the earth, succeeds in creating a real panic in the small village of which he is the center. An atmosphere of terror descends upon the villagers and passes away only with Janet himself. Free of any moral, the little tale is admirably composed.

In Un de Baumugnes, Giono tells the tale of Albin's love for Angèle and of his victory over the obstacles to their happiness: Angèle's seduction, her eventual prostitution, her return with her fatherless child, her imprisonment by her father in a dark cellar. The redemption of Angèle by Albin's love and her subsequent happiness are told quite simply. The story is unpretentious and moving.

Regain is a somewhat more ambitious version of this theme. Panturle, living alone in an abandoned village where only he and a strange old woman remain, is slowly reverting to animal brutishness when a young woman, Arsule, appears by chance in the village. The double salvation, through love, of Arsule and Panturle, as together they create a home, plow the earth, grow wheat, make bread, and thus create what Giono points to as a real and satisfying community, is quite simple and a little over-solemnly told. Regain is a good story that Giono tries to turn into a parable.

With Le Chant du monde (The Song of the World), 1934, Giono enlarges his canvas. The story here is less simple and appears to carry some symbolic significance. Each character seems to embody a theme, and the subject is less man himself than a full orchestration of various conflicting elements, their blending into a harmonious whole. Matelot, a former sailor who has become a man of the forest, and Antonio, the man of the river, leave in search of Matelot's son, the red-headed twin who has inherited the force of his dead brother. The red-headed twin, always connected with the sun or the fire element, has disappeared into the upper reaches of the country, into the realm of Maudru, a powerful figure who reigns over hundreds of bulls.

The two men journey up the river to the land of the Maudrus and eventually arrive in the house of a wise, hunchbacked healer, Toussaint. They find that the red-headed twin had eloped with Maudru's niece, Gina, and in his flight from the wild clan of the Maudrus, had carried her off into hiding in Toussaint's house, where she now frets and fumes. All the characters are obliged to pass the winter in Toussaint's house, waiting for the coming of spring when the red-headed twin will be able to face his antagonist, Maudru.

The first part of the story develops with epic proportions, suggesting all the while that Giono is creating a myth—a myth analogous to that of the adolescent sun god who disappears with winter to be resurrected with the coming of spring. But Giono fails to give dramatic power and symbolic significance to the long period of waiting imposed by the winter months, and from this point on the plot becomes banal. The red-headed twin and Maudru, these two antagonists whose appearances have been so well prepared, are weak and insignificant. When spring brings liberation, the twin burns Maudru's house, and he and Gina, with Antonio and a blind woman Antonio met during the course of his adventures, return, carried back to safety on a raft.

The themes of death and love are woven into the tale and connected with the wildness of the Maudru country, where Matelot dies at the end of winter. With the victory of the flame-like twin over the brute strength of the bull, order is re-established and harmony reigns. The story has somehow lost its power, and the artificially simple pronouncements of Toussaint and Antonio on love, death and evil are inadequate. Neither love nor death is so simple as Giono would have them be.

Giono's next two novels, written before 1940, Que ma joie demeure (Joy of Man's Desiring), 1935, and Batailles dans la montagne (Battles in the Mountain), 1937, show more clearly than Le Chant du monde where Giono's weakness lies. The intellectual armature of his work is too elementary to sustain his tremendous mythical structures. His portrayal of human feelings is rudimentary, perhaps voluntarily so, overly sentimental and slightly vulgar. A righteous naïveté informs his moral judgments and his stories. Dynamic in their outer movement, they are inwardly static.

Only after the shock of World War II did Giono seem to gain the stature to face these limitations. His abundant creative energy has not waned, but his new works are “chronicles” of varying value, unalloyed in their fictitious texture. One of the best of these, one of the best too of Giono's novels, is the strange, terrible and beautiful Le Hussard sur le toit (Horseman on the Roof), 1952. Angelo, the Italian hero of this tale, a young cavalry officer, sets out from Italy and travels up through France during the great cholera epidemic of 1838. His incredible odyssey, his sojourn in the attics of a small town, the fantastic scenes he witnesses, his final return, are skillfully and unpretentiously told. The plague itself, as in Camus's novel, and the mysterious “horseman on the roof,” who is the only character to escape the plague, have their own metaphysical overtones, but Giono does not press them very far. He is content merely to paint with tranquil objectivity the fantastic transformations of the world as the plague marks off and decimates the human inhabitants.

Giono's vast frescoes reflect his fundamental optimism and love of life, his deliberate refusal to deal with the complications of human psychology. The visionary, quasi-divine quality of this “natural” world stands in striking contrast to [François] Mauriac's narrow, introspective world of tormented and solitary human beings, a world where no man or woman can ever satisfy his deepest aspirations.