Encore Provence. by Peter Mayle. Hamish Hamilton. 195pp, £16.99 in UK
An English Garden in Provence. By Natasha Spender. Harvill Press. 205pp, £25 in UK
WHY do people read Peter Mayle? Look no further than the cover photograph on this book - a glorious study in green and purple of a tree adrift in a sea of lavender - for the answer. Comfort, that's why. We want to know that there is a Provence out there - wild, sun-drenched, possessed of a singular beauty and inhabited by a band of colourful eccentrics straight out of 'Allo 'Allo central casting. And we want to know that somebody else has fought it, and won. Somebody entirely unremarkable; somebody genial, tolerant, wry and patient, but not particularly learned or ruthless. Somebody, in short, very much like ourselves.
Thus, we reason, if he can do it, we can do it. Nobody reads Peter Mayle out of a genuine interest in Provence. People read Mayle because they need to believe that, should the daily scratchings and scrabblings of a rat-race run under skies of relentless battleship grey ever, finally, get too much for them, they can always flee to the sun, write books, amass a modest fortune and live happily and unstressfully ever after. To open one of Mayle's Provence books, therefore, is to buy a literary lottery ticket (or, in this case, quite a lot of lottery tickets) which entitles you to lapse into a pleasant daydream for the duration (not very long) of its 200 pages. Nobody is more aware of this than the author and, so, En- core Provence (like its predecessors, A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence - the titles, at least, are improving with age) is chock-full of the mixture of amiable anecdotes, tongue-in-cheek observations and "janey mac" oddball facts which made Mayle into a publishing phenomenon in the first place.
These include the impeccably-told tale of a visit to the railway station of his local town, Apt, to book tickets for the TGV high-speed train from Avignon to Paris, complete with helpful hi-tech clerk who, having consulted a computer, announced that tickets could be booked to anywhere in France and even to London on the Eurostar. The deal was almost done when Mayle inquired about the times of connecting trains from Apt to Avignon. "He looked up from his computer with a frown, as though I had asked a question of extraordinary stupidity. `You can't go from here,' he said . . . " The denouement, of course, involves a deserted platform, an absence of tracks, waist-high weeds and a typically gentle Mayle tailpiece. "However," he concludes, "I was told that, with sufficient notice, a taxi to Avignon station could easily be arranged . . . "
If that one doesn't tickle your fancy there's always the one about the amorous butcher, or the perfume company which encourages blind youngsters to sign up for its "school of initiation into the art and skills of perfumery", with opportunities for subsequent graduation (and this is not, presumably, a joke) to the perfume university at Versailles. Or the corkscrew museum. Or the Provencal drycleaner who, presented with a pair of wine-stained trousers, demanded to know whether the perpetrator had been a Chateauneuf "or one of the lighter Luberon reds".
See? Nothing difficult, nothing remotely unpleasant, nothing even slightly off-putting. But, in Encore Provence, Mayle's earthly paradise is showing distinct signs of wear and tear, all the same. The chapter devoted to an imaginary ideal village is desperately dull, the "beginner's guide to Marseille" is skimpy in the extreme, and, let's face it, boules . . . again? But, if you should find yourself entertaining the uncharitable thought that a fistful of small change below twenty quid is an awful lot to shell out for this modest little volume, consider this: it's an awful lot cheaper than buying a house in Provence.
ONE of Peter Mayle's pet hates is the English household which imposes, by dint of a good deal of elbow-grease and Anglo-Saxon determination, a tumble of glossy foliage on the arid limestone landscape of Provence. But he can't, surely, be thinking of a garden such as that which Natasha Spender, widow of poet Stephen, describes with the loving megadetail of the true gardener in An English Garden in Provence; a garden which begins with an olive grove, tucked under the side of the Alpilles mountains, and meanders from a formal rose garden, complete with fish pond and fountain, along a lilac walk towards a clump of maquis and a tangle of pine and rosemary which blends into the wilderness beyond.
But, is it enough to bloom into an entire book? It is if you add in a generous helping of gorgeous colour photographs, many either taken by the poet Stephen or of him with various casual callers - David Hockney, Iris Murdoch, Patrick Proctor, John Bayley - though Spender is admirably reticent in her comments about her guests, restricting herself to an affectionate note on the subject of pre-breakfast gardening with Murdoch.
With the sound of John Bayley's typewriter in the background (which, Spender tells us elsewhere, she once stalked down the Lilac Walk on hands and knees, convinced it was a woodpecker), she and her illustrious visitor "planted, trimmed and tidied . . . the topic was often thought-provoking . . . and made of these early-morning hours a gently amusing and refreshing interlude". Further filling is provided by the chapter entitled "Dreams and Designs", much of which is devoted to classic English gardens of Spender's acquaintance, and the mildly tedious introduction to a band of unimaginably wealthy neighbours entitled "Gardening Friends". But, for the most part, Spender digs doggedly away at her chosen territory, the garden - with the exception of a delightfully eccentric opening few pages in which she expounds her theory concerning Italian trecento and quattrocentro painters (namely, that their surreal limestone landscapes are remarkably true to nature), and a few (all too few, alas) excerpts from Stephen's elegant, lucid diary towards the end of the book.
Her prose style is rather like the native plants of Provence - spiky, and occasionally somewhat dusty - but with flashes of illuminating colour. Her sumptuous, dignified garden emerges as the book progresses, like something which has been excavated from the ground rather than planted there.
Practical tips for the wannabee olive harvester apart, this is an impressionistic rather than a "how to" book. The Mayle reader in all of us will long for more details of, for example, the restoration of the house itself. This Spender skips lightly over, letting fall merely a few tantalising images as she goes - "That first summer, in 1965, when Stephen and I attempted to camp out in the one end of the house which had a roof - though as yet no doors and only cement floors - I remember as characterised by clouds of dust eddying in the Mistral . . . "
An English Garden in Provence doesn't pander to the voyeur, and won't interest the implacable non-gardener but, if a photograph of a wild cherry on the bough can make you catch your breath, this treasure-trove of prunus and paeony offers a supremely natural way of dreaming about Provence.
Arminta Wallace is an Irish Times journalist
