Mark Johnson’s Secret Weapon

It’s been around for ninety years, it’s still in print and they’ve just made the film. So if you’ve not heard of Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, there are only two reasons for it — and both are in this sentence.

Le Grand Meaulnes might be France’s answer to To Kill A Mockingbird — a crossover classic that’s been studied in French schools for more than half a century. Across the channel most middle class homes have a dog-eared copy somewhere between the TinTin and the Asterix; most are lavishly illustrated with dirty schoolboy doodles. Meaulnes is a country teenager at the turn of the century whose single, strange encounter with an anonymous girl shapes, and warps, his adult life. It’s a prototype Great Gatsby; it’s High Fidelity for the Lost Generation. But the real fascination of the book lies in the author’s own story – the strange story of a man who spent several years of a very short life searching for a woman he once met in the street.

So can a book that’s loved by millions still be a ‘secret weapon’? Perhaps not — but then Le Grand Meaulnes is probably the most secret famous book ever. In translation it’s had more titles than Prince Charles — The Wanderer, The Lost Domain — but on the whole British publishers have retained the French title; an unpleasant mouthful of vowels that goes down like a lead balloon in a country still allergic to books from abroad. “Le Grand what?” friends mumble, politely. And you end up writing it on a beer mat and thrusting it into their reluctant hands and realising you’ve just become that scruffy kid at college who kept telling people they had, just had to read Nabakov, or Ionesco, or Houellebecq.

Where I drink, discussing French novels is about as cool as throwing up at the bar. “It’s MEAULNES,” you say. “Don’t pronounce the S. Or the E or the A, I reckon. Just say Muln and you’re pretty much there. And you will have to ask for it, because ‘Alain-Fournier’ is a weirdly hyphenated pseudonym, not a surname, which means it confuses booksellers, so if you can’t find it under A make sure you look under F. No, the author’s real name is Henry. No, I read it in English. No, it’s not difficult — Nick Hornby likes it. Shall I get another drink?”

Truth be told, I’ve learnt to keep my mouth shut. So I’m incredibly pleased — and not in the least surprised — that this little classic is finally getting a proper English title and a proper author’s name. The Lost Estate comes out in May, now under the authorship of Henri Alain-Fournier: a curious blend of the writer’s real and false identities which should at least mean the book will no longer rock up under F. No cross track billboards, no half price store promotion; the publishers are just giving a wonderful novel an author you can recognise and a title you can say. It’s great marketing, that.