I started this book in a spirit of great curiosity, knowing it to be a hybrid of fact and fiction, or fictionalised facts. What? Well, the facts it is based on are those of the life of the great 20th century writer Lawrence Durrell, whose books, or some of them, I read a long long time ago. I also knew about him from his brother Gerald's wonderful book, My Family and Other Animals, which I read as a child and have given to children and grandchildren to read ever since. From that I had learned of the Durrell family's life in The White House on Corfu, and from that, I'm sure, came my great desire to visit the Greek islands, which I didn't manage to do till many years later. Deborah Lawrenson has taken many of the facts of LD's life and woven them with great skill into a fascinating story. In the novel, LD becomes Julian Adie, but Julian's character and history are, to all intents and purposes, identical to LD's. The central character of Lawrenson's novel, though, is Melissa, a woman in her thirties who discovers, as her mother Elizabeth is dying, that Elizabeth had had some kind of strong link with Julian Adie in Corfu in the 1960s. Startled and intrigued by this discovery, and feeling herself unhappy and confused by a failing marriage, Melissa travels to Corfu to see what she can find out about Elizabeth's secret time there. The truth is slow to reveal itself, but the journey is one on which Melissa discovers as much about herself as about her mother.
This is a fine novel, and manages the difficult modulation between fact and fiction with great skill. I can't say I warmed to Adie/Durrell, a heavy-drinking womaniser, but it was easy to see how women succumbed to his extraordinary charm and powerful charisma. Corfu comes brilliantly to life, and it was all I could do to stop myself rushing down to the travel agents to see if I could get a flight there straight away. Here's a little taste of the novel, describing Melissa's arrival in Corfu:
Evening hung early over the bay when I walked the stony beach at Kalami
and found the White House. It was just as he described: defiant on a
rock, the sea clawing at its feet. On the headland behind, cypress
trees pointed into a curdling sky. Pebbles crunched under my feet as I
went closer, and waves sighed on grey stones. A brackish smell of nets
and seaweed was sharp in the air.
This was how my search began. Looking for someone I
didn't know, many years too late. And looking, at the same time, for
someone I had always known, but trying to place her in a strange
setting, reconfigured in some new history.
Lawrenson has written other novels, which I look forward very much to reading soon. You can learn more about her, and read a longer extract from this novel, on her own website.
