Peter Mayle, glutton for punishment

He lived a rural idyll, wrote about it and became rich. But, as Peter Mayle told CATHRIN SCHAER, not everyone has been delighted.

If it involves plumbing problems in an exotic location and eating strange, foreign food, then Peter Mayle has probably read it.

"The publishers send them all to me," says the British author. "Lemons in Andalucia, the sun in Tuscany, I've had them all," he laughs.

And why? Because the publishers of books such as Under The Tuscan Sun and Driving Over Lemons would like nothing more than a complimentary line on the dust jacket from the man who, it could justifiably be said, sparked the whole literary genre when he published his 1989 memoir of renovating a ruined farmhouse in the French countryside.

But not everyone is as happy about it.

"Peter Mayle should be in prison," grumbled one British writer, David Sexton, recently in a story titled "Peter Mayle's Hideous Legacy."

"Until he published A Year in Provence, the joys-and-tribulations-of-moving-abroad genre scarcely existed. Now we have reached the stage in the publishing cycle where these embarrassing books are cascading from the presses," Sexton continues.

"It's a familiar publishing phenomenon. A single title scores huge sales. Every publisher in town promptly commissions his own imitation. Two or three years later they all arrive in the bookshops, travelling in convoy."

Sexton then reels off a list of books, some of which have eerily similar titles, most of which have obviously similar plots. The two best-known contenders for Mayle's sylvan crown are Under The Tuscan Sun by Frances Mayes and Driving Over Lemons by Chris Stewart. These are about living in rustic ruins in Tuscany, Italy, and Andalucia, Spain, respectively.

But it doesn't stop there. What about the Luberon Garden: A Provencal Story of Apricot Blossom, Truffles and Thyme? Or The Olive Farm: A Memoir of Life, Love and Olive Oil in the South of France? And hang on, there's also On Rue Tatin: The Simple Pleasures of Life in a Small French Town, Instructions for Visitors: Life and Love in a French Town and An Italian Affair to get through.

It's enough to drive even the most mild-mannered armchair traveller to outer Mongolia to renovate a yurt .

"It's certainly become something of a genre," Mayle agrees. "While I think there's always room for another good book, I also think there's an awful lot of second-rate versions around.

"It's gone from A Year In Provence to Six Weeks In Basingstoke or something. But it's not that simple and the public are not that daft - they just won't buy those books."

So he doesn't mind the imitators. What he does mind is being blamed for all the above. "I might have given them an idea but I certainly didn't twist their arms. Publishing is quite a me-too business.

"If there's the slightest sniff of a bandwagon people will be rushing to jump on it. I'm sure there are quite a few second-rate Harry Potters out there too."

Mayle's own story is something of an idyll. Toward the end of the 80s the former advertising copywriter turned children's book author decided to move from Devon to the part of France he had always loved. He and his third wife, Jennie, bought a dilapidated farmhouse near Menerbes, a small village in Provence, for £100,000 ($345,500). They decided to restore it while Mayle wrote his novel.

However, Mayle's descriptions of the surly local tradesmen, the quaint French customs and the fabulous food in a 20-page letter to his agent were so amusing that his continental adventure turned into a book.

That book was A Year in Provence and the first print run was just 3000 copies. Now, by all accounts, the title has sold more than four million copies, been translated into 20 languages, is partially responsible for a 10 per cent rise in tourism in the area it features, and spawned several sequels (Encore Provence, Toujours Provence), a television drama and many, many literary imitators.

Mayle has become an industry, one of Provence's laureates, according to the New York Times. But it hasn't been all mega-francs, long lunches and expensive bottles of French wine. Besides making Mayle a multi-millionaire, his success has also caused him a fair bit of trouble.

He's not just being criticised for inadvertently encouraging imitators. Initially he was also told off for making fun of the French by writing about "his villagers" in a patronising way.

And he's been blamed for "ruining" the countryside by attracting the kind of middle-class undesirables who apparently enjoy his books.

At one stage, he recalls, "all sorts of things were said about me in the British press. That I was getting divorced, that my son was an alcoholic or on drugs.

"We used to get faxes from the Sun addressed to Jennie saying, 'I'm frightfully sorry about your split-up and would you like to tell us about it.'

"My mother would ring up very upset and say, 'Do you know what the Mail said about you, darling?'

"I used to have to stop her writing to the editor to put them straight."

And then there were the coachloads of camera-wielding tourists rolling past the old farmhouse's front window. The couple had become, in Mayle's words, "a minor sightseeing landmark."

"I don't mind people asking me to sign a book. It's when they do things like jump in your swimming pool ... "

Yes, once he even arrived home to find some of the more fanatical sightseers frolicking in his pool. "They had a video camera and told me to take off all my clothes and jump in."

There was also local resentment from the people he had - rightly or wrongly - made fun of. "I still meet people who are not all that thrilled to see me."

One of those is probably Guy Monicucci, son of Mayle's cantankerous plumber, who was presented as a gormless individual in the original book and who has tried to sue the author for loss of earnings - Monicucci calculates this to have been about £200,000 over the years.

Perhaps it's no surprise then that Mayle, his wife and their dog were forced to flee France for the Hamptons, Long Island USA, in 1994. They bought a house on the seafront and lived there for years in relative peace.

But in 1999, unable to keep away from the country Mayle considers home, they returned to France and bought a $US1 million ($2.4 million) mansion in Lourmarin, another small Provencal village, just over the hill from Menerbes. And this time around it seems things are a lot easier in Provence.

The media pressure appears to have eased off. The new house is down a long drive and would-be Mayle spotters cannot see it from the road. The locals have welcomed Mayle - even, he says, going so far as to help ensure his privacy by telling interlopers he's gone to Australia.

And in May this headline appeared in British and French newspapers: "France appeals for 'more Peter Mayles' to save countryside." The Times reported that: "A congress in central France next month will launch a campaign to attract city-dwellers from Britain and elsewhere to small, isolated villages whose future is often threatened by an ageing population."

Mayle has heard about this congress and he's rather pleased. "It's true that some of the central, rural areas of France could do with an injection of tourist money. In a funny sort of way I think all the British and Germans and Americans who move here really do help - after all, they're not the sort who want to put up 30-storey condominiums and they do help out the local economy.

"And personally, after being told by the British press that I was ruining the whole place and 'Christ, why doesn't he shut up about it', it's nice to get the other side of it, to be treated with some amiability in the country in which you live."

Mayle now spends his mornings from Monday to Saturday writing, but takes afternoons off. He enjoys long lunches, basking in the sunshine, wearing shorts (but not socks because he detests them) and taking the couple's new puppy for daily 8km walks.

Research for his new book had him travelling around France attending curious culinary events, such as a village truffle mass at which they give thanks for the annual harvest, a snail fair, a frog market and a Burgundy marathon in which runners dressed like Marie Antoinette taste wine along the way.

Obviously the saturation of the simple-pleasures-of-olive-oil-and-European-peasants literary market was a good reason for Mayle to write something relatively different.

Another is that he now finds it difficult to be an honest observer of the behaviour of plumbers and bakers in Provence - too many people know his name and "people tend to behave differently if they know who you are", he says.

At the various festivals he attended he was known only to a few friends. The result of his travels - Bon Appetit - has already been released in America (where it's been on the New York Times bestseller list for 10 weeks already) and is just about to be released here.

Mayle is now working on another smaller book, a short history of Gerard Auzet's family bakery in Cavaillon, the one made famous by Mayle's Provence books. Now if all that sounds rather idyllic, that's because it is.

By his own eager admission Mayle, now in his early 60s, is very lucky to be living where he is, doing what he does. "It's very rare, you know," muses this genial man in his slightly posh British accent.

"To have a dream about doing something and then when you actually do it, to find it's even better than you thought it would be."

* Bon Appetit: Travels with a knife, fork and corkscrew through France is published on August 2 by Penguin. RRP $34.95