[ilds] Novel about Durrell in Corfu

[Anna Lillios]

Hi Everyone,

     Hilary Paipeti has informed me that a novel has just been published about Durrell's life in Corfu.  Below is Hilary's review of the novel for the CORFIOT magazine.

                                                                                              --Anna Lillios


This is my review of the novel which I told you about. Peter Harrison  
told me the impression if that Deborah Lawrenson is a 'Mills and  
Boon' type writer, but nothing could be further from the truth! Try  
it and see!

Hilary Paipeti

Over the years there have been numerous novels in which Corfu  
provides the setting. First of these may have been Mary Stewart's  
early 1960s book This Rough Magic, notable for its references to  
Shakespeare's Tempest. In this romance based around a smuggling plot,  
Stewart uses the literary device of a conversation between the main  
characters to argue that Corfu was the Tempest island of Prospero and  
Sycorax. In it, she enlarges on a theme which Lawrence Durrell  
develops in a similar way in his Corfu travelogue Prospero's Cell.  
Whilst researching This Rough Magic, Stewart was one of the Durrell  
'set' which would meet at 'HQ', the Liston Bar, and she could well  
have joined in the debates on this subject.
Set mainly in Corfu, Deborah Lawrenson latest novel Songs of Blue and  
Gold can be enjoyed as a straightforward story; but it can also be  
read as an allusion to Lawrence Durrell and his works. A multilayered  
plot (like many of Durrell's) mingles four timeframes (two are  
purported biographical studies) as an Englishwoman searches for the  
truth of her mother's life. At the centre is the larger-than-life  
personality of Lawrence Durrell, Julian Adie in the book. Adie lived  
with his artist wife in Kalami's White House before the war, and  
later, in Egypt, he put together his memoirs of the time in a  
travelogue called The Gates of Paradise. He is also famous for his  
work The Cairo Triptych, and at the point we meet him, in 1968, is  
mourning the death of his third - and best - wife Simone. Though  
Lawrenson explains that Adie is a fictional character, for  
Durrellians the book is a veritable treasure trove of similar  
references, including a very funny parody of a magazine article by  
Durrell called Oil for the Saint, and a polymath character with  
elements of Durrell's friend and mentor Theodore Stephanides.
In today's timeframe at the start of the book, Melissa's mother  
Elizabeth is dying, and she is also losing her husband. One of  
Elizabeth's last actions is to present Melissa with a book of poetry  
that contains a message hinting at a connection with Julian Adie.  
Distraught, Melissa seeks solace in the search for the truth about  
her mother's past (which we discover piece by piece in the Durrell/ 
Adie timeframe sections), and in doing so she rediscovers her own  
happiness.
Songs of Blue and Gold, we find out towards the end, is a work of  
poetry Adie planned to write, just as Durrell must have been thinking  
out his Avignon Quintet at much the same period. Talking with Adie in  
1968, Elizabeth describes Goethe's colour wheel, in which 'yellow...  
splendid and noble... is the polar opposite to blue...' [Have a look  
at the colour wheel on any computer programme for layouts, like  
QuarkXpress] This is the key to the book; the counterpoints of blue  
and gold that crop up time after time. The retroactive suggestion  
that the structure of the colour wheel would have inspired Adie's  
poetic cycle parallels Durrell's use of the quincunx for structuring  
his Quintet.
Lawrenson's novel also shadows Durrell's Alexandria Quartet in the  
witnesses' differing interpretations of its key event, the drowning  
which is catalyst in the relationship between Adie and Elizabeth.  
Ambiguous interpretations of this event - suicide, accident or  
murder? - in the four timeframes hint at an underlying theme, which  
Melissa expands on: biography, its search for meaning, is essentially  
subjective.
It's a subtle and well crafted novel which deserves close attention,  
but you won't lose out by treating it simply as a finely written  
story in which Corfu takes one of the starring roles.
Songs of Blue and Gold
Deborah Lawrenson
Arrow Books (Random House)
ISBN 978-0-099-50519-8
Published August 2008
www.deborah-lawrenson.co.uk
Next month: An in-depth interview with Deborah Lawrenson.
The author's previous novel, The Art of Falling, is also available  
from Arrow Books.




Dr. Anna Lillios
Associate Professor of English
Department of English
University of Central Florida
P.O. Box 161346
Orlando, Florida 32816-1346

Phone: (407) 823-5161
FAX: (407) 823-6582