[In the following review, Sheringham examines three works by Tournier—The Wind Spirit, Le Tabor et le Sinaï, and Le Médianoche amoureux—and two books about his work, Colin Davis's Michel Tournier: Philosophy and Fiction and Françoise Merllié's Michel Tournier.]

Paul Klee talked of "taking a line for a walk": Michel Tournier does something similar with themes, playing brilliant variations on the idea of "carrying" ("la phorie") or of twinhood, and exploiting the revelatory energies of those oppositions—nomad and sedentary, image and sign, instruction and initiation—which he calls "clefs binaires". In The Wind Spirit, an intellectual autobiography originally published as Le Vent paraclet …, Tournier applies some of these keys to himself.

The account of his childhood is dominated by meditation on a quality it for the most part lacked, the sense of initiation which, since the Enlightenment, has been progressively banished from education, along with physical contact and any sense of ritual. Metaphysics, into which he was initiated by an inspiring prof de philo, opened up vistas he has ardently surveyed ever since; philosophical systems, those of Spinoza, Leibniz, Sartre, have long held more interest for him than the "comic-strip" efforts of most littérateurs. Tournier was slow to find his métier as a novelist, but when he did, after a spell in post-war Germany that fuelled his enthusiasm for its cultural heritage, his ambition was to blend the abstract harmonies of the metaphysical systems he so admired with the forward thrust and dynamism of the pre-modernist novel. The basis of this alliance would be myths, those fundamental stories amid whose murmurs we spend our lives. The novelist's task, Tournier decided, was to contribute to this mythological "bruissement", and much of The Wind Spirit is concerned with the ways he has set about it: rewriting Robinson Crusoe as a fable about identity; fusing the most abstruse details about the Third Reich with a welter of public and private myths in Le Roi des Aulnes; combining lore culled from psychology, meteorology, sexual pathology, and the socio-politics of waste-disposal in such a way as to make Les Météores a novel about fate and destiny, heredity and environment, knowledge and reality.

All this makes excellent reading and stands up well in an able translation, though British readers may be taken aback by some of the Americanisms, for example the description of Hitler as "the man with the bangs [for "la mèche"] and the little mustache," or the choice of "the SOB's" for Sartre's "les salauds". Like one of his own characters Tournier is flamboyantly opinionated, proudly eccentric and doughtily at odds with the orthodoxies of his society; what is more, this theorist of "le rire blanc", a metaphysical laughter he identifies in the noblest products of the human spirit, writes with an amusing verve which sometimes verges on facetiousness. But where the novels are ironically multi-layered, and refuse to privilege a single narrative voice, The Wind Spirit brashly lays down the law, pinioning fictional incident to anecdotal antecedent, blurring the distinction between the thematic obsessions of the writer and the hobby-horses of the man in the street. Oddly, though, the overall effect is less reductive than one might expect. If Tournier's readers and critics cannot sidestep this authorized version, its whole tone and manner encourage one to question many of its more dogmatic assertions.

Accordingly, throughout his fresh and stimulating study of Tournier's novels [Michel Tournier: Philosophy and Fiction, 1989] Colin Davis argues that they are less reassuringly traditional than the author of The Wind Spirit tends to imply. Furthermore, it is from the tension between a traditional metaphysics and a generally unacknowledged sympathy for a post-Nietzschean acceptance of fragmentation, difference and the lack of absolute truths, that Tournier's fictions derive much of their energy. Each major novel features a protagonist who tries to impose coherence on his world, creating "self-legitimating spirals of interpretation which seek to exclude the human possibility of doubt". In Le Roi des Aulnes Tiffauges's seductively cranky delusions thrive on the hermeneutic zeal with which he greets each day's fresh crop of signs. By imposing a grid on what he sees, Tournier's mild-mannered ogre, gluttonous for meaning, blinds himself to what is really happening. His complicity with the terrible violence of the Nazi regime, which surprises and engulfs him at the end, stems from his unshakeable belief in an absolute order revealed by symbols. Davis justly sees the novel as a cautionary allegory of interpretation. This does tend, however, to reduce its scale and to play down the text's moral ambiguity and its post-modern (intertextual scrambling of fact and fiction) as against its modernist aspects.

In an amusing passage in The Wind Spirit Tournier wryly alludes to "the danger of letting loose flamboyant homosexual geniuses in novels". Like Vautrin and Charlus, Alexandre in Les Météores slipped the author's leash and took on an unanticipated importance. Appropriately, Davis devotes considerable attention to this "gay deconstructor" whose caustic strictures on heterosexuality, gender roles, and indeed any fixity in the sphere of identity, constitute a disruptive force in the novel, albeit one which is repeatedly subject to containment, as more traditional ideas, regarding women for instance, reassert themselves.

Since Les Météores (1975) Tournier has largely abandoned the full-scale novel for other forms. In treating this period thematically, concentrating on Tournier's attitudes to meaning, language and art, Davis somewhat exaggerates the novelist's concern for purely philosophical questions. The chapter on "Art and Truth" works best, no doubt because the metaphysics of vision, and the visual arts generally, have come to play a commanding role in Tournier's fiction. These concerns dominated his last novel, La Goutte d'or, where the pure sign, associated with Islamic calligraphy, was set against the imaginary plentitude with which the Christian, and now the commercialized, West has invested its images. And they are also prominent in Le Tabor et le Sinaï (the Biblical mountains reproducing the same opposition), a collection of brief texts on contemporary artists, written mainly for exhibition catalogues, where we can see Tournier elaborating ideas he will use in his fiction.

In a very different vein from Davis, Françoise Merllié's Michel Tournier provides an up-to-date, enthusiastic, not to say hagiographic, presentation of the novelist's accomplishments. A lengthy essay, which lays the pop psychoanalysis on a bit thick but ranges fluently across the canon, is followed by copious bibliographical and biographical supplements, and by a concluding essay on Tournier's conception of "le métier d'écrivain". It is interesting to learn that President Mitterrand now pays Tournier an annual visit, usually in August.

Tournier's latest fictional work, Le Médianoche amoureux, is a collection of "contes et nouvelles". The distinction is important. A few years ago, in an essay on Perrault's "Barbe-bleu", Tournier situated the conte half-way between the opaque realism of the short story, which resists the liberating quality of philosophical speculation, and the crystalline transparency of the fable, which allows ideas a ready, and thus altogether hollow, triumph. In the best stories of Le Coq de bruyère (1978), an earlier collection, Tournier scored some notable successes in this mode. By comparison the new book, while containing much to admire, succeeds less well. One explanation is perhaps an excess of self-consciousness on the part of one whose self-image as a writer has come to be that of a conteur. In Le Médianoche amoureux the ethos of the conte actually becomes a protagonist in a narrative which frames the very diverse stories in the book.

Yves and Nadège are an unhappy couple: they don't talk any more. Having made up their minds to separate they lay on a great feast at which they plan to announce the sad news to their friends. But in the course of this "médianoche" each of the friends, as in the Decameron, tells a story, and it is these stories which make up the book. Some are nouvelles and these, we are told, aggravate the couple's discord. But some are contes and these prove so therapeutic that they are reunited.

It is easier to credit the divisive quality of the former than the epithalamic properties of the latter. States of affective isolation and the sometimes bizarre and inventive ways in which the solitary individual seeks to break out of them, have long been a dominant theme of Tournier's and The Wind Spirit had some profound reflections on the curse of solitude. The nouvelles in Le Médianoche are monopolized by the voices of first-person narrators whose own solitude is often reflected in the stories they tell. One story features a consmopolitan business man who revisits his childhood village on impulse and, after catching up with the (usually dreadful) news of his contemporaries from an old school buddy, botches an attempt to buy a house in the neighbourhood. Two stories involve people who devote their entire lives to complicated and rather pathetic acts of vengeance. Another is about a teacher whose own memory of childhood trauma helps her to understand children's needs, but who loses this gift when circumstances force her to undergo psychotherapy: restored to psychic "health" she becomes "une femme sans ombre".

If the symbolic realm is in bad shape in the nouvelles, the contes amply make up the deficit; here vengeance is sumptuous, commemoration—a central theme of the book—is enriching, colours and shadows abound. What is more, where the nouvelles, in spite of the fulsome tones Tournier lends most of his narrators, have the authentic thinness of the fait divers, the contes are enhanced by the stereophonic effects provided by intertextuality. "Angus" rewrites an episode from Hugo's La Légende des siècles; "Pierrot ou les secrets de la nuit" (originally published as a children's book) explores the narrative potential (such as it is) of the words to "Au clair de la lune"; "Les deux banquets ou la commémoration", like the two very fine contes interpolated in La Goutte d'or, is pure Arabian Nights.

Glad as one is to see Nadège and Yves reunited, it is hard not to have some reservations about these rather whimsical performances. In the days of The Wind Spirit Tournier used to extol the virtues of myths: "stories everyone knows". The message now, it seems, is that stories tout court can restore us to the amniotic environment from which we are severed by our solitary lives. This is certainly worth thinking about, but it would be worrying to feel that henceforth the main concern of this often controversial writer is to do us good. Perhaps it is a sign of decadence to crave provocation, but Tournier has in the past ensured that we expect nothing less of him.