This book by Lawrence Durrell was published in 1945. It is an account of his life on Corfu in the years 1937-38. It forms part of a loose “island trilogy” with the later Reflections on a Marine Venus (Rhodes) and Bitter Lemons (Cyprus).
The great strength here is Durrell’s eye for the unusual and his extraordinary descriptive prose. This is a book full of local colour in every sense. It opens with the sentence: “Somewhere between Calabria and Corfu the blue really begins”. He was primarily a poet, after all. He is particularly effective at evoking the maritime world and the sea is a constant presence. There are vivid descriptions of night fishing for squid and octopus by carbide lamp.
The part of the island where Durrell lives is tranquil in 1937: “The silence here is like a discernible pulse – the heart-beat of time itself”.
There is not much narrative to speak of, and it has to be said that some of the philosophical conversations with his Greek friends are a bit tedious. It is one of these friends who claims to have proved that Corfu was Prospero’s island in The Tempest.
There is an extraordinary visionary passage where Durrell, bathing in a rock pool, seems to have become one with the landscape: “One is entangled and suffocated by this sense of physical merging into the elements around one”.
The book is perhaps most effective as an attempt to convey the history, myths and customs of Corfu as revealed in the everyday lives of its inhabitants. He gives us the details about olive gathering and oil manufacture, a village dance in old-fashioned clothing, and a strange pageant dedicated to a mythical figure who embodies the Greek character. Even the brief period of British rule has left its trace in an enthusiasm for cricket. I think of it as a sort of literary cubism, where it does not really seem to be going anywhere, but by the end the reader has gained a complete picture.
Like Kipling, Durrell was born in India and spent his early years there. I have wondered whether his painterly talent for rendering colours and landscape in words derived from this in some way.
This book is connected to the story of the Durrells’ family life on Corfu as told by Gerald elsewhere, although you wouldn’t really know it. There is a fleeting reference to “my brother” and “his guns”, so that must be Leslie. Lawrence was living with his wife Nancy in the White House to the north of the island, while his mother and siblings lived elsewhere, but he doesn’t really mention them much. Nancy is referred to only as “N” here.
Towards the end, the coming war starts to make its ominous presence felt and the final section is an epilogue looking back from Alexandria in 1943. This is pointing towards Durrell’s later career and the collapse of his marriage to Nancy. She was something of a shadowy figure, but her story has now been told by her daughter Joanna Hodgkin, in Amateurs in Eden. Prospero’s Cell portrays pre-war Corfu as a paradise lost.
This book can be seen as an early example of a sub-genre of writing that became popular in the 1950s, which sought to bring the colour, sunshine and abundance of foreign locations to a Britain still feeling the effects of wartime austerity. Other examples of this are the Mediterranean cookery books of Elizabeth David, with their cover illustrations by the painter John Minton, and the James Bond books.
Fleming kept Bond in England in Moonraker but readers complained so he did not repeat the experiment. Jamaica was Bond’s real home and perhaps the Caribbean was to Fleming what the Mediterranean was to Durrell.
The Good Reader 