Never go back…. Reading this novel, in itself steeped in nostalgia, was an entirely nostalgic enterprise. I was about fifteen when I first read it, for school. I recollect sitting in a Victorian classroom, high windows lending a gloomy, ecclesiastical light. A member of staff walks past outside, over cobbles, whistling Jerusalem. Boys look around, bored. The teacher, probably an earnest young man, who has made the Faustian pact of a healthy salary in exchange for a life of tedium in the provinces, talks about Alain Fournier.
Why this book should have been chosen for us to read, I don’t know. It seems too much like something out of a novel. The wistful novel within a wistful world. Yet it was well chosen, because it resonated. It has stayed with me, the distant bell of youth.
This is a novel all about being young, the romantic dreams of youth. A coming-of-age tale, if you like. Seurel, the narrator, recollects the impact that the stranger, Meaulnes had on his life as a teenager, and then the impact of Meaulnes’ doomed dreams. He does so, conjuring a lost world of ruined estates, gypsy boys, and wan maidens. To an English reader, it felt and still feels quintessentially French, a marriage of beauty and melancholia, the well-behaved step-child of the poets maudits. Meaulnes discovers a lost estate, or domain, which has been taken over by children, and later goes to ruin, before being sold off. This lost domain is also, of course, childhood itself, a land of dreams which will be gradually disassembled as adulthood encroaches.
It makes one think that those who stay truest to the noble ideals of childhood are those least suited to the world of adults. Meaulnes’ sweetheart doesn’t make it, and Meaulnes himself becomes a wanderer, forever exiled from his kingdom, which was the kingdom of childhood. The more one ages, the further removed one becomes from that fairy land. It’s a beautiful tale, constructed on a universally tragic truth.
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