Les Baux

 

Photo of Alistair MacLean, by Clayton Evans, on the rear jacket of Caravan to Vaccarès (1970) 

[Image source: https://www.bonanza.com/items/search?item_id=139916921&q[search_description]=1&q[search_term]=Caravan%20to%20Vaccares .]

I mentioned Les Baux-de-Provence when I wrote about Alphonse Daudet's Lettres de mon moulin. In his time it was remote and impoverished. These days the tourist literature tends to describe it as one of the most beautiful villages in France.  

In the opening to Caravan to Vaccarès Alistair MacLean put a different spin on it, appropriate to his action thriller: 

‘The cliff battlements of Les Baux, cleft and rent as by a giant axe, and the shattered, gaunt and terrible remnants of the ancient fortress itself are the most awesomely desolate of all ruins in Europe.’ Or so the local guide-book said. It went on: ‘Centuries after its death Les Baux is still an open tomb, a dreadful and dreadfully fitting memorial to a medieval city that lived most violently and perished in agony: to look upon Les Baux is to look upon the face of death imperishably carved in stone.’

Well, it was pitching it a bit high, perhaps, guide-books do tend towards the hyperbolic, but the average uncertified reader of the guide would take the point and turn no somersaults if some wealthy uncle had left him the place in his will. It was indisputably the most inhospitable, barren and altogether uninviting collection of fractured and misshapen masonry in western Europe, a total and awesome destruction that was the work of seventeenth-century demolition squads who had taken a month and heaven alone knew how many tons of gunpowder to reduce Les Baux to its present state of utter devastation: one would have been equally prepared to believe that the same effect had been achieved in a couple of seconds that afternoon with the aid of an atom bomb: the annihilation of the old fortress was as total as that. But people still lived up there, lived and worked and died.

Soon there will be a relentless "on the run" sequence among the moonlit ruins of Les Baux. 

Caravan to Vaccarès (1970) has its irresponsible way with this part of Provence, but it's at least as much about hotels as about Camargue white horses and bull dancing. (I don't want to even begin on its stereotyped gypsy villains.)  MacLean had himself had a go at the luxury hotel business; it didn't work out, so he went back to bestsellers. The Hotel Baumanière, setting of these opening pages, is a perfectly real hotel (and it does indeed have three Michelin stars). The novel is dedicated to the hotel's owners. 

MacLean had a BA in English from the University of Glasgow, but he knew he didn't write particularly well, and didn't care. Sales of his books are estimated at over 150 million. (Irrelevantly but interestingly, his mother tongue was Gaelic.)

Perhaps Chaucer's Temple of Mars had stuck in his head during those undergraduate days:

Ther saugh I first the derke ymaginyng
Of Felonye, and al the compassyng;
The crueel Ire, reed as any gleede;
The pykepurs, and eek the pale Drede;
The smylere with the knyf under the cloke;
The shepne brennynge with the blake smoke;
The tresoun of the mordrynge in the bedde;
The open werre, with woundes al bibledde;

(The Knight's Tale, ll. 1995-2002)

At any rate that's what shows up here:

‘I still don’t understand.’ He gazed forward through the windscreen. ‘Could it be that the fair Miss Dubois is in the process of falling in love?’

‘Rest easy,’ she said calmly. ‘The fair Miss Dubois has no such romantic stirrings in mind.’

‘Then why come along with me? Who knows, they may all be lying in wait – the mugger up the dark alley, the waiter with the poison phial, the smiler with the knife beneath the cloak – any of Czerda’s pals, in fact. So why?’

‘I honestly don’t know.’

He started up the Peugeot. ...

But the allusion might not be directly to Chaucer. Nicholas Blake's The Smiler with the Knife was the fifth Nigel and Georgia Strangeways mystery, published in 1939 (Nicholas Blake was the crime-writing pseudonym of the poet Cecil Day-Lewis). 

Comparing it to distant memories of the dog-eared MacLean novels I picked up at school (HMS Ulysses, The Last Frontier, Where Eagles Dare), Caravan to Vaccarès feels more like a comedy-thriller, its hero dressing up in gypsy costume, then as a polka-dotted white-sombreroed guardian (Camargue cowboy) and finally as a clown in the bullring.  It's distinguished by a sort of ponderous humour of overstatement and understatement and spelling out the obvious, which runs alongside the hectic action and clipped dialogue. It keeps suggesting Wodehouse's phrasing, but without the sharpness or purpose.

He moved very slowly and very quietly on rubber soles and kept to deep shadow. There was, of course, no positive reason why the gypsies should have any watcher posted: but as far as this particular lot were concerned, Bowman felt, there was no positive reason why they shouldn’t.

I'm unclear how in control the author still is. MacLean had never enjoyed the labour of writing and something, his alcoholism perhaps, was seriously impacting his prose just a couple of years later. But here we're still teetering. 

Bowman waited no longer: if there was one thing that had been learnt from dealing with those men it was that procrastination was uninsurable. 

So it's time to make that lung-bursting ascent to Les Baux. 

A small cemetery lay to his right. Bowman thought of the macabre prospect of playing a lethal hide-and-seek among the tombstones and hastily put all thought of the cemetery out of his mind. He ran on another fifty yards, saw before him the open plateau of the Les Baux massif, where there was no place to hide and from which escape could be obtained only by jumping down the vertical precipices which completely enclosed the massif, turned sharply to his left, ran up a narrow path alongside what looked like a crumbling chapel and was soon among the craggy ruins of the Les Baux fortress itself. He looked downhill and saw that his pursuers had fallen back to a distance of about forty yards which was hardly surprising as his life was at stake and their lives weren’t. He looked up, saw the moon riding high and serene in a now cloudless sky and swore bitterly to himself in a fashion that would have given great offence to uncounted poets both alive and dead. On a moonless night he could have eluded his pursuers with ease amidst that great pile of awesome ruins.

And that they were awesome was beyond dispute. The contemplation of large masses of collapsed masonry did not rank among Bowman’s favourite pastimes but as he climbed, fell, scrambled and twisted among that particular mass of masonry and in circumstances markedly unconducive to any form of aesthetic appreciation there was inexorably borne in upon him a sense of the awful grandeur of the place. It was inconceivable that any ruins anywhere could match those in their wild, rugged yet somehow terrifyingly beautiful desolation. There were mounds of shattered building stones fifty feet high: there were great ruined pillars reaching a hundred feet into the night sky, pillars overlooking vertical cliff faces of which the pillars appeared to be a natural continuation and in some cases were: there were natural stairways in the shattered rock face, natural chimneys in the remnants of those man-made cliffs, there were hundreds of apertures in the rock, some just large enough for a man to squeeze through, others large enough to accommodate a double-decker. There were strange paths let into the natural rock, some man-made, some not, some precipitous, some almost horizontal, some wide enough to bowl along in a coach and four, others narrow and winding enough to have daunted the most mentally retarded of mountain goats. And there were broken, ruined blocks of masonry everywhere, some big as a child’s hand, others as large as a suburban house. And it was all white, eerie and dead and white: in that brilliantly cold pale moonlight it was the most chillingly awe-inspiring sight Bowman had ever encountered and not, he reflected, a place he would willingly have called home. But, here, tonight, he had to live or die.

Or they had to live or die, Ferenc and Koscis and Hoval. When it came to the consideration of this alternative there was no doubt at all in Bowman’s mind as to what the proper choice must be and the choice was not based primarily on the instinct of self-preservation although Bowman would have been the last to deny that it was an important factor: those were evil men and they had but one immediate and all-consuming ambition in life and that was to kill him but that was not what ultimately mattered. There was no question of morality or legality involved, just the simple factor of logic. If they killed him now they would, he knew, go on to commit more and more heinous crimes: if he killed them, then they wouldn’t. It was as simple as that. Some men deserve to die and the law cannot deal with them until it is too late and the law is not an ass in this respect, it’s just because of inbuilt safeguards in every legal constitution designed to protect the rights of the individual that it is unable to cope in advance with those whose ultimate evil or murderous intent is beyond rational dispute but beyond legal proof.  ...

[Basically this is the same argument as Suffolk's in Act III Scene 1 of 2 Henry VI. But Suffolk deploys it to rationalize the murder of the innocent Duke Humphrey.]

The chasing gypsies do the whole run with their knives held in their hands, which doesn't seem like a great idea. I suppose it's just a picturesque detail for the reader, and a reminder that they are to be regarded in the light of villains rather than as fellow humans.

Jacket of the UK first edition of Caravan to Vaccarès

[Image source: http://www.alistairmaclean.com/First-Editions.html .]

Online text of Caravan to Vaccarès:

https://www.rulit.me/books/caravan-to-vaccares-read-661489-1.html

Two sites that entertainingly review all Alistair MacLean's novels:

http://www.alistairmaclean.com/ (author anonymous: appreciative and restrained.)

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/?s=Alistair+MacLean (by Simon -- an enormous site -- he also surveys Samuel Beckett, Christopher Marlowe, Gustave Flaubert, and who knows what else.)

Both surveys describe an oeuvre whose standout works come quite early, and whose quality then declines, at first slowly and then precipitously. 

It's a trajectory whose shape reminds me, of course, of Sir Walter Scott's, that first bestseller of adventure stories. Caravan to Vaccarès is in the still-good-but-not-quite-so-good part of the curve; the MacLean equivalent of, say, Quentin Durward. 

It's difficult to be a one-person franchise. How can you not change, if you're alive? But then how can you change and still pull in the money? 

The one who never changes

becomes another.

(Gösta Ågren)

This comparison is disconcerting in some ways: one of the greatest of novelists with one that hovers in vacuity only just above Jeffrey Archer. But still, Scott's novels were a highly commercial enterprise; he shared his printers' view of them as product, and he had convictions that predisposed him to feel all right about this; an aversion to artistic pretension in himself, a profound belief in the honest dignity of commerce. 

And for MacLean, you have to admit that reaching so vast an audience makes him sociologically important, at least. Books such as his promoted social continuity at all costs: that blind bedrock needed a lot of topping up. In civilization there was a great deal of inner violence to be soothed, a great many pills to be swallowed lightly each morning. 

Jeffrey Archer's combined sales, Wikipedia says, are 275 million copies.