JULIAN GREEN'S adored mother came from the American South, and his bilingual childhood in Paris was filled with her stories and memories of that region, which came to signify for him a magical, lost land. More than half a century ago, when his mother was long dead, he wrote the first chapter of a novel set in the old, antebellum South, only to find that Gone with the Wind had beaten him to it and killed off any immediate competitors. He put the fragment away.
In the early 1980s he unearthed it and wrote a long novel which, unexpectedly, became a bestseller under the title The Distant Lands. A sequel followed, called Les Etoiles du Sud, which became a bestseller too - well over half a million copies sold in France alone. This is the present volume, which is remarkably unlike the obsessive, neo Gothic, sometimes guilt ridden novels on which Green's substantial reputation largely rests.
The South was traditionally the home of American chivalry, where men were men and women were worshipped provided they stayed within certain limits and con formed to a certain role - which, probably, most of them were at home in anyway. When Green went to America as a youth and attended the University of Virginia, much of the old chivalrous, aristocratic, hieratic ambience remained, and there were even some Civil War veterans still alive, though aged and deaf. All these memories must have surfaced in his two novels, written in old age.
In spite of the subtitle, there is little war or fighting depicted, and the kaleidoscope or montage of impressions shows a region still prosperously at peace, and relatively self assured of its own identity and survival. The descriptions of Savannah are rich, colourful and aromatic, a semi tropical lotus eating land where the realities of slavery and economic competition are safely in the background. The central character, Elizabeth Escridge, is a wilful, beautiful widow with a young son, who is courted by a dashing but shallow cavalry officer, William Hargrove. She marries him, but near the end of the story is widowed for a second time when he is killed at the first major battle of the Civil War, Bull Run (or First Manassas as the South still calls it).
The relationship between mother and son is dominating and complex, and it is hard not to believe that Green is barking back at certain moments to his own mother, who died while he was a schoolboy. Elizabeth's courtly Uncle Charles, who refuses to believe that war is imminent until it actually bursts upon him, is art other central character, but there is a very large cast, with the black servants and retainers providing a kind of operatic (sometimes tragic) chorus. The dominant flavour is bitter sweet and slightly overripe, evoking a way of life whose apparently tranquil domesticity and douceur de vie is menaced both from within and without.
Predictably, Green is at his best on an intimate level when he turns to public events and public men, such as Robert E. Lee, he is sometimes perfunctory and obvious, even cinematic. Though the impending ruin and downfall of his beloved Old South is the central theme, his treatment of this is most convincing when he deals with the fate and emotions of individuals, rather than with the panoramic canvas of politics and war. The novel is, nevertheless, an exceptional achievement, by a writer uniquely at home in two very different culture and able to draw imaginatively on both. The translation, though fluent, contains a few peculiarities and false idioms which should have been ironed out at an early stage.