A guided tour of Michel Tournier's home reaffirms the impression created by the public image of a writer who is often presented as a throwback to the great age of the author-journalist, the modern-day Balzac, Dickens, or even Zola. He lives in an old village presbytery, south of Paris, which has been converted into a functional dwelling. Inside, the décor is not ostentatiously old-fashioned, and there is a large television set in the living room. The staircase positioned in the centre of the house leads to the room at the top. Sheaves of paper, thick like parchment, and a bulbous-shafted antique fountain pen crowd the surface of the single desk, prominently placed half way along the wall opposite the doorway. The room should be expansive; square-shaped, it covers the full surface area of the house. However, the desk and its accoutrements, the writing lamp and the chair, are cocooned in the uniform, dark pine of the floor, walls and ceiling. There is no word processor or computer screen anywhere to be seen. As the humble guest ventures the words, ‘Ça fait un peu le genre Proust’, the writer, with a characteristically dramatic gesture, and impeccable timing, flings open the shutters by the desk, and the green sweep of the Vallée de Chevreuse, with its pockets of trees and narrow lanes weaving in and out of the meadows like dollar signs, floods the field of vision.

Tournier has operated what Marcus Hester, writing on the nature of metaphorical insight, terms the ‘gestalt switch’, a device that transforms the world in which the protagonist exists in the absence of any permanent alteration of its sensible features. In this case it is a trick of the light caused by the sudden opening of the shutters. Its effect is one of spectacular agrandissement, but it is not a simple trompe-l'oeil, for the eye has already been deceived as to the proportions of the writer's den. Over the years Tournier has brought his readers to a multitude of transitional viewpoints such as this. His work has been understood by some as a vehicle for different ideas about society based on the durability of mythical archetypes, deconstructed by others into a myriad of quotations from other texts near and far-gone.