by Guy Somerset, The Dominion Post, 13th June 2005

THE spectre of Peter Mayle hangs heavily over Englishmen who have decamped to rural France in search of the good life, so Sam Taylor is to be applauded for the altogether different tack he takes in his first novel, The Republic of Trees.

A former pop writer for Britain's Sunday newspaper The Observer, Taylor also sidesteps another cliché: that of a memoir or thinly disguised autobiography regaling us with anecdotes and humorous japes from the music world.

Instead, Taylor has written an increasingly ominous fable about a dreamy, adolescent English orphan who, along with his elder brother, runs away from the house where they live with the French aunt and joins two brother-and-sister friends to camp deep in a nearby forest.

So far, so innocent, but their prelapsarian idyll turns to terror as first sex rears its head and then they decide to re-enact the French Revolution - never a good idea.

From the children poring over The History of the French Revolution and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, to naming their encampment The Republic of Trees, calling each other Citizen and erecting a guillotine, you just know it's going to end horribly.

Did Taylor know quite how horribly when he began writing the novel? 'Right at the beginning, maybe not. But I suspect it was in the back of my mind somewhere, because a lot of the novels I like best have darker elements. Fairy tales work better, I think, when there's some element of nightmare.'

Taylor can identify with Michael's daydreaming, and sees the trait in his own children. 'The comment in the book about Michael being "souvent dans la lune" - often on the moon - is a remark our kids have had at school from their teachers. And I think a lot of kids are, when they are young and living half in their imagination and half in the real world. And to be able to go back to living like that, as I've done, is very nice. To be a professional daydreamer.'

Taylor's professional daydreaming came after he gave up his job on The Observer in 2000 to move with his French wife, Odile, and family to a farmhouse in a remote part of rural southwest France, near the Pyrénées.

An unplanned decade in journalism had waylaid Taylor's original ambition to write a novel. However, for the first year, he had a contract with The Observer, and actually interviewed Mayle, author of A Year in Provence. Wasn't he tempted to follow in Mayle's footsteps?

'There's not that much you can write about here,' he explains, laughing. 'I like Mayle actually, but I think the market is completely saturated now. When he did it, it was a new thing and it had some impact. Now it's been done to death and I wasn't really interested in that.'

Combining Lord of the Flies with the French Revolution was an inspired idea - where did that come from? 'It doesn't sound very impressive or inspired when I actually describe how it happened. I was just reading a lot about the French Revolution at the time because I was interested in it. I'd never done it at school. I was living here and, you know, you can still feel the effects of the French Revolution living in France now. So I just wanted to find out what happened. And through that I found out about Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well, who was an influence on both Marie Antoinette and Robespierre, which is quite an unusual combination. Really, the book came from something I was obsessed about at the time. It wasn't thought out.'

There were, however, several literary antecedents, including Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden and Iain Banks's The Wasp Factory. 'I was very attracted to that kind of end-of-adolescence, heat-of-the-summer atmosphere, with dark things happening. I like a lot of those books. And a lot of them are first novels. It's just something that seemed to feel right.'