The twelve casual and surprising verses in St Matthew's Gospel which tell the story of the Magi have grown into nearly three hundred pages in Michel Tournier's spectacularly free retelling of it [Gaspard, Melchior & Balthazar]. In the biblical version, and in the vast iconography that is descended from it, the Three Wise Men travel as one, inseparably bound on a common mission. In Tournier's version they become enduringly distinct from one another, assorted victims of fate with very different hopes of what may happen to them in Bethlehem. Each king is a real or metaphorical exile from his country and has his mind fixed more on the distressing past than on the open future. Each in his way finds an answer to his deepest needs in the Christian promise of the Nativity.

As a novelist Tournier's forte has been just such retellings of old legends asking for renewal. His belief about myths is that we need them, that they are marks of our humanity and that they are by their nature subversive, being invitations to deny the rightness of any existing order, social, philosophical or ethical.

So it is that the encounter of Gaspard, Melchior and Balthazar with the infant Jesus authorizes a revolution in their lives….

In these three episodes, or case-histories, Tournier has given us his reasons for esteeming the Christian scheme on social, aesthetic and political grounds. But he does not stop there: there are more obviously spiritual grounds too. To the stories of the three Magi he has added a fourth story, of another traveller from the East, Prince Taor of Mangalore, taken, he says, from a Russian Orthodox source. Taor's story is the longest and most captivatingly strange of all in this book….

Gaspard, Melchior & Balthazar is an anthology more than a novel; the stories which it contains support but do not require one another. Tournier is now a very forthright moralist and sees strengths perhaps in so offhandedly loose a construction, whose effect is certainly one of dramatic convergence on the Nativity and the symmetrical radiation of Christian ideas. This is no pietistic Christmas story but a work of substance and variety—playfully circumstantial in some parts, memorably symbolic in others. Tournier's imagination runs equally to the sublime and the macabre: he has no rival among French novelists of his generation for writing books that are at once vivid and intellectually provocative.