by Jane Cornwell, The Australian, 28th May 2005

THE forest of Armagnac, not far from the village of Bonnefont, sprawls within viewfinder distance of the snow-capped Pyrénées. Carpeted with leaves and bracken, cut into by a thin, winding creek, it seems to protect anyone who wanders into its midst. Today, English-born author Sam Taylor and his three young sons - Oscar, Milo and Paul - trudge noisily about, climbing trees, jousting with fallen branches, leaping back and forth over the water. It's Wednesday and the boys have the day off from their small rural school. The yellow bus that calls at the gate of the stone farmhouse where Taylor and his French wife, Odile, live will call tomorrow, but today they've escaped to the forest.

It's the forest - dark, mysterious, enveloping - to which four English schoolchildren escape in Taylor's debut novel, The Republic of Trees. Newly expatriated in southwest France, rebelling against uncaring relatives, they disappear armed with a copy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, bent on creating their own little utopian community. Declaring the area around an abandoned cottage 'independent territory', they hunt, climb trees, nick the odd chicken, raid the larders of holiday homes. It's summer: clothes come off, awakening sexuality is... well, awakened. Our narrator, Michael, becomes increasingly obsessed with Isobel ('We kissed for an hour, yet it felt like whole sun-drenched afternoons passed between breaths'). Innocence morphs into experience, and with it comes Joy.

Taylor makes convenient use of Michael's frequent drink-fuelled blackouts, his adolescent theorising about parallel selves, to drop this serpent into Eden. One day Michael simply awakes, hungover, and there she is. All braces, bad skin and unruly black hair, Joy is a foil to Isobel's translucent beauty, her rigid adherence to group discipline a catalyst for the inevitably horrific denouement. Imbued with a lyricism that captures the forest's stillness and a fable-like quality that absolves Taylor from answering such questions as 'why is the outside world so strangely deserted?', The Republic of Trees is being touted as one of the debut novels of 2005. Film rights have been sold, the book is shooting up British bestseller lists and Taylor - despite his obvious debt to William Golding - is Britain's tyro author du jour.

To think that just five years ago, as a 29-year-old father of three, Taylor was sitting in a grubby motel room in the English town of Derby dreaming of escape. The then pop music critic of The Observer newspaper was there to review a gig by former Spice Girl Mel C when suddenly he had the Damascene-like revelation that he didn't have to do it any more. 'I felt so happy, I almost enjoyed the concert,' he says from across a patio table dappled with spring sunshine, his sons now climbing the trees in their garden. 'I was tired of the stress, of feigning excitement. I felt life was slipping by. Living somewhere else and writing a novel was something I always wanted to do.'

Taylor grew up in a housing estate on the Midlands, within cooee of Sherwood Forest. At school he daydreamed, wrote poetry. At 11 he had a mini-novella, a horror story, read out in class. He discovered music; his first concert was AC/DC's For Those About to Rock. Later, at university, he did a degree in American Studies, wrote a dissertation on Bruce Springsteen, and read Albert Camus, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges on the side. He went to Paris to see Springsteen play, wrote a review of the Boss's concert on spec and sent it to The Observer. 'The editor couldn't use it but he asked me to write something else. I told him I was about to travel around Europe and hole up in Spain to write a novel. He said I was mad, as did my friends and family.'

Taylor got stuck into journalism, interviewing the likes of Janet Jackson, conspiracy theorist David Icke and a Californian hippie who'd built a multimillion-dollar empire out of selling herbal ecstasy. His muse nagging, he started a Bonfire of the Vanities-type novel in 1997 but binned it after a rejection from literary agent David Godwin (now renowned as the man who 'discovered' Arundhati Roy). In 2001, he tried penning a book from the viewpoint of a flea but binned that, too. In France, he wrote a few "living in the French countryside" pieces for The Observer; Godwin, impressed, got back in touch.

'I told him I was writing a novel and he said to give him a call when I'd finished. It was two years before I did.' With Odile supporting the family through work as a translator, Taylor reinforced his self-belief as a writer - basically, he says, because he had to. He had been reading about the French Revolution, was fascinated to discover that Robespierre carried a copy of The Social Contract in his pocket, and that Marie Antoinette, Robespierre's bete noire, was similarly obsessed with Rousseau. From his first-floor study, another forest in view across the cornfields, he imagined being an adolescent and disappearing into it: 'I couldn't get Rousseau out of my head, so he went in as well.'

Taylor insists that Lord of the Flies was not a conscious influence. Nonetheless, as with many impressions made when young, he agrees it was probably an inevitable one. 'I read Golding at school, around the time I was reading about clitoral orgasms and other sexual stuff in my mum's women's magazines. I was baffled by the fact that here you have a whole island of schoolboys and not one of them masturbates or has a single dirty thought. So in the same way that Golding took The Coral Island and corrupted it, I've taken Lord of the Flies and corrupted it even further.'

The first of his two versions was longer and more naturalistic. And it didn't work. Fascinated by the notion of memory anyway (his next novel, a detective story, has the working title The Amnesiac), Taylor realised that gaps can sometimes be more effective than filling them with writing. So when Michael fails to remember, has the sensation that he's falling, or suffers a stab of deja-vu, the reader wonders where reality ends and fantasy begins. Joy decorates the camp by painting iridescent eyes on trees, tents and rocks, a symbol of the revolution, of Rousseau, of - ultimately - paranoia.

Taylor wanted to write something memorable. 'So many books out there vanish into obscurity as soon as they're published,' he says. 'I deliberately set out to be shocking, to elicit an emotional reaction. I wanted to make heads spin and hearts beat faster.'