Adieu, Provence, a Review of “A Good Year,” by Peter Mayle.

One’s initial thought on picking up Peter Mayle’s latest novel is something like: How cheap—a story about (surprise) an Englishman moving to Provence, replete with charming anecdotes about French peasants, wine and food. First impressions die hard in reading a book, and if suspicions about the effortless conversion of non-fiction into fiction abound at the outset of the reading process, Mayle’s story does not fully put them to rest. Instead of buying a house as Mayle did in real life, this protagonist inherits one. Instead of being married, he is (joyfully) single. Instead of being middle aged, he is thirty. Instead of simply passing the year dog-walking and eating, the protagonist uncovers a fairly uninteresting scam involving wine made from the grapes of his vineyard. And he eats plenty.

That A Good Year fails to deliver is more the pity because A Year in Provence was actually quite a good read for the following reasons: It was clear that Mayle had waded deep into his experience in a foreign country, learnt the language, engaged the locals and sauntered off the beaten path. This established him as a good cultural traveler, and the characters he portrayed—although perhaps slightly exaggerated for stereotypical effect—were three dimensional, as was his interaction with them. In order to be a good travel writer one must be a good traveler as well as a good writer, and Provence proved that Mayle had what it took to go native and retain enough sense of the outsider to comment meaningfully and entertainingly on the experience.

But fiction is a different animal, and A Good Year falls down for precisely the reasons that Provence succeeded: all the incidental detail about village life, foody experiences, wine. The plot, in as much as there is one, is watery and thin, like a young wine from an unremarkable vineyard (in England), and it plays second fiddle to the real star of the book: the Luberon. It also fails to take off until two-thirds of the way into the book, the preceding material mainly dealing with the Englishman’s move to France, all of which is a little deja-vu.

Certain chunks of the book are even clearly recognizable as thinly disguised re-writings of parts of Provence, such as the meeting of the protagonist with Roussel the French peasant who has been working the vines for the last thirty years, and is nervous that the new owner of the estate will want to can his operation. It is as if Mayle wrote the book to fantasize about making himself twenty years younger, divest himself of his wife, and surround himself with nubile, saucy French mademoiselles and activities only marginally more exciting than the days he so scrupulously describes walking his dogs in the hills.

Another consequence of Mayle writing what he knows (which is a rule of thumb many writers use, with uneven results) is that his hero, a thirty-year-old investment banker from London, ends up speaking and acting more like a fifty-year-old (or like a thirty-year-old circa 1958). The hero’s best friend is even worse in this respect, both of them using phrases like “a spot of lunch,” and “you old bugger.” For a young hot shot in London’s City, this is sad, if not completely unrealistic. However it is abundantly clear that the protagonist, Max, is meant to come off as somewhat suave (enough to get the classy French chick); instead he, and to a greater extent his sidekick Charlie, (who sports boxer shorts with the “salmon and cucumber colors of the Garrick club”) read like a couple of slightly camp “fuddy-duddies” to use a choice English expression, more at home gargling wine and listening to opera, whilst discussing bouquets, than doing what most single thirty-year-olds do best.

At the end of the day A Good Year is, of course, a lightening summer read, not to be too closely criticized, better read and forgotten. But one cannot help feeling that Provence, that Good Earth which was probably best left undiscovered, has been commodified beyond repair especially by Mayle’s insistence on squeezing every last drop of value out of it in book after book—Toujours Provence, Encore Provence, etc.—and I would therefore offer a humble idea for the title of his next book: Adieu, Provence. And then I would suggest he move to Languedoc and rest on his laurels.