It’s easy to envy Sylvain Tesson. This well-born man travels to write and each of his books, for several years, has been at the top of the charts. A success which offers him “fantastic freedom of maneuver”, allowing him to “finance absurd trips to complicated places”, he recounted in The Express in January 2024.
Thus, in the summer of 2022, in the company of two friends, the travel writer embarked on a 15-meter sailboat to sail from Spanish Galicia to the Shetland Islands in Scotland, via Brittany and the Ireland — then return via the Caledonian Canal.
Three months “suspended in the light”, he writes in With the fairies, his new story, a new escape from “the noise of men, the stupidity of figures”.
A season to tease the fairies, on the lookout for the beauty of the world and traces of old Celtic culture, the lost fruit of “worshipers of twilight”. What does the author mean by The snow leopard (Gallimard, 2019, Renaudot prize) by the word fairy? For him, it is above all “a quality of reality revealed by a disposition of the gaze”.
But “Technology had taken over the world, the masses were growing, commerce was leading the way. Everywhere there is noise, reason, calculation, fury,” the writer tells us, with an increasingly assertive anti-modern lyricism. And the fairies of his childhood had “withdrew into silence”.
In search of beauty – and a good word – Tesson puts on his sailor’s cap and casts off. Sometimes at the helm, sometimes on foot or on a bicycle, always with a book in hand, the writer casts his “re-enchanted” gaze on the immutable: cliffs beaten by foam, dolmens, massifs of heather. All things from which ooze a nostalgia to which the writer says he is sensitive.
But With the fairies slides also quickly towards the very virile “Arthurian gesture”, the knights of the Round Table à la Chrétien de Troyes and a social commentary tinged with blue blood. The funeral of Elizabeth II, at the end of September, thus gave her the opportunity for a sort of royalist “coming out”, making her regret “the adhesion of all to the splendor of one”, noting that “the absence of a myth was our tricolor misfortune, to us who had killed the mystery.
Enough to give food for thought to those, numerous, who today reproach him for ideological sympathies, circumstantial or proven, with the French extreme right.
It remains that in the forests of Siberia, through the “black paths” of France, on the Tibetan highlands or sailing along the Celtic “literal cord”, misanthropic more than ever, Sylvain Tesson seems to prefer landscapes to Human being.
The result is a rather lazy book, peppered with contemplative filler and approximations. Like when he speaks, in a pub in Cork, in the Republic of Ireland, of a “pro-British man” sipping his beer to the sound of the “fife” and the violin. Or, worse, when he says he went to see “Lake Innisfree”, in County Sligo, which does not exist – unlike Lough Gill, where there is an island called Innisfree, immortalized by the poet William Butler Yeats.
And if he is indeed clocking up the nautical miles, Sylvain Tesson is also treading water quite a bit, watching himself write more than usual. A way like any other, perhaps, to make the fairies appear? “They existed when we worked to make them appear. »