Michel Tournier, who has died aged 91, was one of the leading French novelists of the last third of the 20th century. He was a splendidly inventive and imaginative writer committed to reviving myths and legends for readers who had lost touch with the truths they represented. He prepared meticulously for his 10 major novels, reading and travelling widely, and spending up to five years on each, converting old tales into new stories that uncovered the continuities of our collective experience.
Thus Tiffauges, the hero of his novel Le Roi des Aulnes (1970; The Erl-King), explains Nazi death camps by tracing the hostility shown to Jews, Gypsies and other wandering peoples to the hatred felt by the sedentary farmer Cain for his nomadic bother, Abel. Comparable connections underlie Tournier’s reinterpretation of the folk figure of the ogre in Le Roi des Aulnes, the biblical story of the Magi in the 1980 novel Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, and the myth of Robinson Crusoe, who finally shrugs off his social persona and achieves contentment in a mystical union with his island in Vendredi, ou les Limbes du Pacifique (1967; Friday, or the Other Island).
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