Books: Rosemary Goring on why Romain Gary is the most compelling new author she has encountered this year

The feeling intensified last month when I came upon a writer I had never before read, and was so beguiled I wanted to bring all his books home. He is a late discovery, yet only one among hundreds of gaps to be filled. Though to the well-read he will be familiar, Romain Gary, a Russian-Polish-Jewish-French novelist, is the most compelling new author I have encountered this year.

In the early summer, Penguin published the first English translation of his novel The Kites, which first appeared in France in 1980 as Les cerfs-volants. It has also reprinted his so-called memoir, Promise at Dawn – La promesse de l’aube, 1961.

A flamboyant, popular yet melancholic figure, Gary was one of France’s most lauded writers, twice winning the Prix Goncourt. The rules of the country’s highest literary accolade forbid anyone to win it more than once, but he was accidentally given it a second time because he had been writing under a pseudonym and in a completely different style.

It was The Kites that caught me, though only at the second attempt. The opening pages of this coming of age war-time novel are a little verbose, arch and self-consciously Proustian, as when he describes the philosophy by which his remarkable uncle Ambrose Fleury steered: “It took me many years to find my way through which things were matters of great consequence and faith to him, and which ones he drew from wellspring of irony that seemed to flow from some pooled source where the French go to find themselves when they are lost.” It is only when Gary’s other literary qualities make themselves known – intense conviction and a dare-devilish artistry – that you swallow the hook. Thereafter you are tugged helplessly in his slipstream, following the story and, even if not believing every word, hanging on it nevertheless.

Set in Normandy, it is recounted by Ludo, a boy of ten when we first meet him in 1932, who is afflicted with the same astonishingly tenacious memory as the rest of his family. In the woods he encounters a fair-haired Polish girl, Lila, from the nearby manor house, who is imperious and bossy. As a motherless child, this is just what Ludo has been looking for. After his coup de foudre, when he holds her attention with a basket of strawberries, he spends years returning to the same spot in the hope of meeting her again. When he does, the reader does not need to be particularly perspicacious to appreciate that even if romance ever follows, it will have daunting obstacles to overcome.

From the peasant classes, Ludo is being brought up on a farm by old Ambrose, a dreamy rural postman and kite-maker who is treated by his neighbours as “a harmless eccentric”. A decorated veteran of the Great War, who had been shot in the chest, Ambrose is now a pacifist to the bone. When he defends conscientious objectors, his nephew writes, there was a glint in his eye, “probably just a reflection of the flame burning at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier”. Before 1939, his kites are made in the shape of great cultural figures from France’s glory days: Rousseau, Diderot, Montaigne, Voltaire. As war engulfs the country, and collaborators and Resistance fighters queasily co-exist side by side, he mocks the Nazi regime with his off-taking kites depicting, for instance, the day when Marshall Petain shook hands with Hitler. For many years the Germans can never catch him out in his insolence. Not being stupid, however, they intuit the danger he poses, and limit the height at which his kites can be flown.

The Kites’s tone is wistful and comic, ironic yet also passionate. It does not flinch from the horror of those times, yet neither does it wallow in it. Nor is it judgemental, except of those who are venal. Collaborators are seen as fully human, and not wholly despicable. In a manner that closely reflects Gary’s personality, the narrator’s voice is a blend of sadness and melodrama, of unvarnished realism and unquenchable idealism. Ludo himself is no less polarised. He thinks nothing of working for the Resistance under the enemy’s eyes, risking death with each mission, yet a cold look from Lila reduces him to a wreck.

As for the storyline, it has a fairytale clarity and improbability, yet it is persuasive as the best of thrillers. From the opening vision of Lila eating strawberries in the woods in her snowy white dress, to her miserable existence years later as a German officer’s mistress, The Kites is on every page a fable rather than fiction. It is this that makes it stand out. Bitingly and even savagely true, it is an emblematic piece of art, a riposte and even a manifesto against violence and war, stupidity and cruelty. It is also a tribute in tragi-comic form to undying romantic love.

It comes as little surprise, then, that Gary’s memoir, Promise at Dawn, shares much of The Kites’s quixotic charm and revels in important moments of farce. Purportedly an autobiography, but no less a work of invention than his fiction, it is a mythologising account of his early childhood in eastern Europe – that much is true – and the indelible role his astonishingly strong-minded and excessively protective mother played in his life, which was also true.

Fragments of it align with the facts, though to learn the authentic life one must turn to David Bellos’s biography. What does emerge from the highly stylised, hyper-ventilating, self-mocking and often brilliantly picaresque portrait of an artist in the making is that, like Ludo and his uncle Ambrose, Gary had a lionheart, swaddled in layer upon layer of day-dreaming. A fighter pilot for the Free French, a diplomat in Los Angeles, married for a second time to the Holywood actress Jean Seberg, and a writer of national renown, he seems never to have taken himself half as seriously as he did his literary characters. Throughout Gary’s giddying but compelling book, the real subject is not his rise from rags to riches, nor even his domineering mother, but the nature of integrity, courage, art, and holding true to one’s beliefs.

There are wonderful moments, as when Gary stands accused of leading his girlfriend to expect more from him than he intended. Turning up at his mother’s door, she claims he has ruined her. Sobbing the story out, she says, “He made me read all of Proust, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. What is going to happen to me now? Who will want to marry me?”

From his youth, Gary had determined to become a world famous writer, in order to do his mother proud. Yet despite writing the final chapter of countless “brilliant” novels – he could never be bothered writing the earlier chapters that led up to this – his first success left him unmoved. On publication of a short story in a newspaper, when he was an almost starving young man, he writes: “I slowly folded the weekly and went home. I did not feel in the least bit excited but, on the contrary, sad and tired. I already knew the difference between the ocean and a drop of water and it only made me more aware of the impossible task ahead.”

Eventually, Gary surpassed even his mother’s expectations. Tragically, though, it did not save him from his incurable unhappiness. It makes bittersweet reading to learn that despite the effervescence and far-sightedness of The Kites, shortly after he finished it Gary shot himself. He let go of the string, but his stories float above us, airborne for all to enjoy.