SOURCE: "Story as Therapy," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4506, August 11-17, 1989, p. 879.

In the following review, Sheringham examines three works by Tournier—The Wind Spirit, Le Tabor et le Sinaï, and Le Médianoche amoureux—and two books about his work, Colin Davis's Michel Tournier: Philosophy and Fiction and Françoise Merllié's Michel Tournier.

Paul Klee talked of "taking a line for a walk": Michel Tournier does something similar with themes, playing brilliant variations on the idea of "carrying" ("la phorie") or of twinhood, and exploiting the revelatory energies of those oppositions—nomad and sedentary, image and sign, instruction and initiation—which he calls "clefs binaires". In The Wind Spirit, an intellectual autobiography originally published as Le Vent paraclet …, Tournier applies some of these keys to himself.

The account of his childhood is dominated by meditation on a quality it for the most part lacked, the...