Goethe’s poem is about an ogre (hence the translation of the title) who steals children’s souls. Tournier also draws on the legend of Saint Christopher, whose practice was to carry travelers on his shoulders across dangerous streams. According to this legend, Christopher once carried Christ, who in gratitude caused Christopher’s staff to bloom. Tournier’s protagonist, Abel Tiffauges, finds himself torn between the seemingly opposite poles of good and evil that the ogre and the saint represent.

Tournier’s short novel Gilles and Jeanne is based directly on historical models: Joan of Arc and her protector, Gilles de Rais. Tournier suggests that Gilles, having seen Joan burned at the stake for her supposed heresy, decides to follow her to Hell by sexually torturing and murdering children. In this case, however, Tournier’s peremptory treatment of his subject renders his thesis unconvincing.

Tournier’s most complex novel, Gemini, also draws on a number of sources, but less obviously than in some of his other works. Its treatment of the twins Jean and Paul (whom others refer to as a single unit, Jean-Paul) relies more on myth than upon literary or historical examples. Myths are ancient stories that seem to explain natural occurrences, or that reveal meaningful patterns behind apparently ordinary events. The Greek myth of the twins Castor and Pollux is highly important in Gemini, but myths of one kind or another are seldom absent from Tournier’s work. After all, Robinson is as much master of a kingdom (to place him in his mythic dimension) as he is a shipwrecked sailor. Additionally, Abel Tiffauges is as much a savior, or a demon, as he is a mechanic caught up in a war.

Tournier’s use of familiar forms and mythic patterns is no guarantee of literary success. His most successful book, The Ogre, is above all the story of a believable, if disturbing, character who undergoes a series of events that are by turns gripping, frightening, and puzzling. The novel’s other elements, such as Tournier’s research into the Nazi period, are subordinated to the story. However, when the ideas behind Tournier’s books dictate their structure, as some readers found to be the case in Gemini, the result is less compelling.

Tournier himself seems to have sensed this problem with Gemini. The novel that followed, The Four Wise Men, is lighter in tone and far more focused. Much of Tournier’s shorter fiction has also struck a light, even whimsical note. As Tournier himself realizes, he is most successful in conveying his unorthodox ideas when they are presented in entertaining and reassuring forms.

Friday: Or, The Other Island

First published: Vendredi: Ou, Les Limbes du Pacifique, 1967, revised 1978 (English translation, 1969)

Type of work: Novel

A sailor shipwrecked on a tropical island comes to understand his true nature.

Friday: Or, The Other Island was Tournier’s first published novel and dramatizes the differences between Robinson’s Eurocentric values and those of a native of the archipelago in which he is marooned. Tournier assumed that his readers would be familiar with Daniel Defoe’s classic novel Robinson Crusoe, and he fashioned his work around it. He follows Defoe’s book closely at first but slowly departs from its outline, eventually arriving at a strikingly different conclusion.

As Friday opens, Robinson is having his fortune told by his ship’s captain. Robinson, the captain announces, is an organizer. Organizers are not skeptical and therefore do not realize that their attempts at creating order are illusory. The captain further predicts that after many travails Robinson will be saved by a child. As the captain enlarges upon these comments, their ship runs violently aground. When Robinson awakens, he finds himself alone on an island, and (it is clear to the reader) begins living out in detail the fortune the captain has told to him.

After a period of gloom in which he names his new home the Island of Desolation, Robinson manages to build a rational, even overorganized, life for himself. He has periodic bouts of depression in which he immerses himself in a kind of bog, but he always manages to pull himself out, literally and figuratively. He rechristens the island Speranza (hope).

Perhaps most important, Robinson discovers a cave at the island’s center. The cave serves not only as a storeroom for the food he grows and the explosives he salvages from the wreck of his ship, it also functions as a womblike retreat from the rigors of the orderly world he has created.

Robinson does not intend to rescue Friday. He first sets eyes on him as the young man is brought from a neighboring island by cannibals to be sacrificed. The captive escapes and is about to lead his captors to Robinson’s hiding place when Robinson decides he must shoot him. The shot is deflected and hits one of the pursuers instead. The young man throws himself gratefully at Robinson’s feet.

Friday submits indifferently to the rigidly ordered life Robinson offers him but proves nevertheless to be Robinson’s rescuer in turn. Finding Robinson’s store of tobacco in the cave, he secretly begins smoking it. One day, on the verge of discovery, he tosses his pipe into the cave, sets off the explosives, and destroys everything Robinson has created.

Robinson awakens to Friday’s world. Relieved of everything connecting him to his previous life, Robinson embarks upon a new existence. He stops wearing clothes and discovers an entirely different island beneath the skin of the one he has created. He learns to play. He grows his hair long, shaves his beard, and develops a tan, all of which increase his resemblance to Friday. The two are no longer master and servant but companions.

Thus Robinson’s world is threatened when a ship eventually arrives. Robinson is appalled, but Friday is fascinated by everything that the ship represents. When it departs, Friday is on board, but Robinson stays, consoled because the cabin boy has jumped ship and taken refuge on the island. Robinson decides to name him Thursday.

The Ogre

First published: Le Roi des Aulnes, 1970 (English translation, 1972)

Type of work: Novel

A French mechanic finds himself drawn into the morally ambiguous world of the Third Reich.

The Ogre may be one of the most disturbing books ever written. It follows a simple-minded man into the heart of the Jewish Holocaust and dramatizes his confusion so thoroughly that the reader may find it impossible to escape. By the time Abel Tiffauges realizes the terrible extent of his predicament, he is lost—and the reader is lost with him. This accomplishment accounts for the book’s reputation as Tournier’s most powerful novel but also explains the dismay it has caused.

As a sickly child, Abel was placed by his parents in a foster home called St. Christopher’s. By the time the reader meets him as an adult, he has developed into a strong but emotionally underdeveloped mechanic whose interests in children and photography are easily misinterpreted. When a young girl incorrectly identifies him as a molester, he is arrested, but he escapes prosecution because France is mobilizing for war. He eventually finds himself working with carrier pigeons in the French army but is captured by the Germans and assigned to a labor camp.

Abel comes to love wartime Germany, a nation whose many rules and regulations leave no room for the troubling ambiguity of civilian life in France. From ditch digger he is promoted to driver and eventually to gamekeeper on Field Marshal Hermann Göring’s hunting preserve, Rominten. He discerns the elements of a grand plan in everything that has happened to him and is convinced that events, large and small, revolve around him. He sees the fall of France as retribution for the wrong done to him by the incorrect accusation, and he interprets his rise to a position of some authority in Germany as tacit avowal of his central importance.

An odd event confirms Abel’s sense of destiny. While he is delayed on a mission, an unidentified corpse is pulled from a bog, and at first Abel’s superiors believe it may be him. On closer inspection the corpse turns out to be that of a man who died two thousand years ago and whose body was preserved in the peat. The scientist examining the body refers to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s haunting and beloved ballad, “The Erlking” (handily neglecting to mention the poem’s sinister subject), and suggests that the find be named in its honor. This Erl-King’s resemblance to himself is not lost on Abel, and when a second, smaller body is found in the bog, it merely confirms him in his identification. His subsequent reassignment to the Kaltenborn Napola, a Nazi military training camp for boys in the eastern forests of Germany, convinces him that fate is preparing him for a special purpose.

Events develop rapidly. On a mission to gather “recruits” for the camp, Abel discovers a Jewish boy, Ephraim, who makes him realize the extent of the Nazi predations against the Jews. Abel’s delusional world totters. Is he Saint Christopher, who carried travelers on his back? Is he the Erl-King, who carried away children’s souls? Christ? Adolf Hitler? As Russian troops break through German lines to the east and Kaltenborn Napola is consumed in flames, Abel lifts Ephraim to his shoulders and tries to escape, but the two sink into a bog. The last thing Abel sees is the Jewish six-pointed star revolving in the sky.

The Four Wise Men

First published: Gaspard, Melchior, et Balthazar, 1980 (English translation, 1982)

Type of work: Novel

Four kings in search of enlightenment seek the newborn Christ.

The Four Wise Men marked a turning point for Tournier. It appears to be one of the simplest of his books and seems to mark a tacit acceptance of Christianity. It is certainly his most humorous work. Beneath its surface simplicity and charm, however, The Four Wise Men is a telling examination of the beliefs by which people live.

The Four Wise Men consists of seven main sections, a postscript in which Tournier summarizes his sources, and some brief notes. The first three sections consist of the stories of the three traditional Magi: Gaspar, Balthazar, and Melchior, all of whose names derive from nonbiblical sources. Gaspar is a black king of Méroé in southern Egypt who buys two blond slaves and who gradually grows ashamed of his color. His faith in himself is restored when he travels to Bethlehem and sees that the infant Christ is black. Balthazar is the king of Nippur, a region of Babylonia. His great museum has been destroyed by a priest who disapproves of graven images, but Balthazar learns in Bethlehem that art pays tribute to creation and is therefore not sacrilegious. Melchior is a prince of Palmyra, Syria, driven out of his country before he can become king. In Bethlehem he discovers that it is possible to rule without violence and political manipulation, and he decides to found a heavenly city on earth.

There follow three episodes that serve to place the stories of the Magi in perspective. “Barbedor” is an allegory of death and renewal, suggesting the replacement of Jehovah by Jesus. “Herod the Great” is a long and grimly realistic portrait of political life in Palestine. “The Ass and the Ox” accounts the birth of Jesus from humorously unusual perspectives.

Tournier’s account of the fourth Magus, Prince Taor of Mangalore in southwestern India, takes up nearly a third of the book and is obviously its most important section. Taor is so enamored of sweets that he sets off in search of a Divine Confectioner whose imminent appearance has been heralded by prophets. His way is long, his entourage huge, and his progress slow, so Taor misses the birth of Christ. He encounters the other three Magi and listens to their dissimilar stories of what they found in Bethlehem, but he is unable to reconcile their accounts with his expectations of the ultimate sweet he supposes the Confectioner will dispense.

Taor’s subsequent travels strip him of his possessions and his followers. Pursuing an obscure destiny, he ultimately trades away his own life by taking the place of a debtor sentenced to work in the salt mines of Sodom and is released after thirty-three years. This period of time, of course, leads Taor and the reader to Christ’s last days and to the reader’s realization that Taor has achieved a Christlike state without the necessity of Christ’s having died to expiate his sins.

Resuming the search he had begun years before, Taor arrives at the table of the Last Supper just after Christ and his disciples have departed. In sampling the remaining bread and wine, Taor becomes the first man after the disciples to receive the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist, and he is received into Heaven.

The Wind Spirit

First published: Le Vent paraclet, 1977 (English translation, 1988)

Type of work: Nonfiction

Tournier recounts the key experiences of his life and identifies the insights that have shaped him as a writer.

Despite its subtitle in English, The Wind Spirit: An Autobiography might be more accurately called a series of autobiographical essays. While Tournier certainly provides factual details about his life, most serve as springboards for more general comments. The book is studded with ideas, aphorisms, and philosophical observations—many of them highly provocative. Thus his account of his childhood in “Born Under a Lucky Star” includes attacks on the “mutilating, castrating culture” in which he grew up, the rigidly antisexual Christian religion to which he was exposed, and the city of Paris, which he found thoroughly hostile. By contrast, he remembers with delight his grandfather’s seemingly magical pharmacy and the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen.

Tournier stresses his family’s identification with Germany and German culture, and in the book’s second (and longest) chapter he traces the origin and gestation of his most highly regarded novel, The Ogre. In a particularly striking passage, he describes his adolescent delight in the chaos that followed France’s defeat by Germany in World War II. He concludes with a moving lament for the culturally sophisticated Germany that Adolf Hitler destroyed. While a novel must be judged independently of its author’s comments and opinions, readers of The Ogre will find that The Wind Spirit provides invaluable insights into the novel’s symbolic structure and development.

In another chapter Tournier examines the relationship between the experiences of Alexander Selkirk and the book that those experiences inspired, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. It is the latter that in turn inspired Tournier’s first novel, Friday: Or, The Other Island, which reinterprets the role of the castaway’s “savage” companion. Tournier admits that he considered dedicating the novel to his country’s many Fridays, the Third World workers who make bourgeois life so comfortable—a comment that anticipates the subject matter of his fifth full-length novel, The Golden Droplet. A subsequent chapter analyzes the philosophical underpinnings of Gemini, his controversial fictional treatment of identical twin brothers.

In “The Mythic Dimension,” Tournier describes the excitement of his university years and his bitter disappointment at failing the examination that would have allowed him to become a teacher—a failure that set him on the path to writing. He discusses contemporary literary and philosophical figures, such as Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre, and recounts his adolescent naïveté in “improving” the words of German novelist Erich Maria Remarque, whose All Quiet on the Western Front he translated. Typically, Tournier moves from the specific to the general, in this case drawing together his memories and his thoughts to comment on the power of myth. In what might well be his credo as a novelist, he observes: “Man rises above animality only by grace of mythology.”