In less than a decade, the publication of Peter Mayle's phenomenally successful series A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence has put Provence on the map. The books have entranced armchair travellers with their accounts of Mayle's eccentric but kindly neighbors and have lured others to sample first-hand the cultural and gastronomic delights of southern France. Notwithstanding his casual bonhomie, Mayle's role as ambassador to the Provence generates textual tensions that undermine his rosy portrayal of rural community and enhance his already liminal position.
Mayle depicts his move from his native London to rural Provence as a rebirth into nature where the weather-driven "Provencal clock" replaces the urban mantra of "time is money." The proximity to nature is particularly evident in the importance attached to food, which measures nature's bounty and seasons and as such represents spiritual as well as physical health. Provencal life is marked too by its insularity. The villagers' distrust of outsiders is matched only by their loyalty towards locals. The communal ethos of the village highlights the exploitative and impersonal practices of nearby Cote d'Azur; likewise, the simple austerity of village life throws into harsh relief the excesses of the coast, where congestion and construction testify to the destructive impact of the tourist hordes.
But the infernal trinity of tourism, commercialization, and modernization threatens to corrupt the Provence too. Although the Mayles' own village is as yet immune to the "creeping horrors of property development," evidence of such development and its attendant evils is already visible in neighboring areas. In addition, the summer influx of visitors, whose urban views and cultural insensitivity disrupt the region's pastoral rhythms, offers an unsettling taste of what the future may hold.
Mayle aligns himself with his neighbors in vocally bemoaning the impact, physical and cultural, the intruders exert on his community. However, complaints that tourists have snapped up all the tables at his favorite cafe are problematized by his unspoken awareness that in publicizing the region's charms he functions as an agent of unwelcome change. That is, even as his role as travel writer enables him to pay loving tribute to his adopted home, it renders him a threat to the stability of that home. In A Year in Provence, Mayle is a potentially disruptive force within the village community. That potentiality has begun to be realized by the time he writes Toujours Provence in response to the spectacular success of the first book. His accounts of the newly-acquired celebrity of Menicucci the plumber and of the autograph-seekers who descend upon Menerbes are underlain by his somber recognition that the Provence he cherishes may, in fact, not be "toujours" at all.
Affectionately reflecting upon his neighbors' parochialism, Mayle notes in A Year in Provence that "it was well known that foreigners of one stripe or another were responsible for causing most of the problems in life." The statement is freighted with unconscious meaning, denoting as it does Mayle's own ambivalent position within his community and the impact he has on it. Both books deal directly with Mayle's liminal status as neither native nor tourist and less explicitly with his emerging awareness that he is now neither French nor English. Submerged by these two layers of liminality is another: with the Provence he narrates threatening to become mere memory, Mayle uneasily inhabits the generic space between travel writing and memoir.
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