[D. J. Enright's] four novels, which appeared between 1955 and 1965, while they have had considerable critical acclaim, have received less than their due attention from the reading public. All these novels are set abroad, in Alexandria, the imaginary island of Velo, or Bangkok or Japan. No doubt this fits in with the simple biographical fact that Enright has spent a considerable part of his career abroad as a Professor of English Literature in various Far Eastern universities. He undoubtedly knows what he is talking about. But it is also in keeping with his reflective, poetically sensitive and coolly registering mind. He is a writer who believes that 'civilization consists in the diminution of human tears', and his response to Far Eastern life contains a quite unsentimental pity for the harsh life of the poor, a cool antagonism for affectation and power whether of academics or politicians, and the small and human virtue of hope, offered by Enright with a characteristic mischief—or flippancy, as some call it.
'The four novels I have published are all really travel books, I am afraid' is Enright's own comment on his fiction. This is an unduly modest dismissal of work in which the execution is finished, the writing light and elegant, the comedy smoothly evolved and the product of an individual point of view, the characters clearly projected, the values humane and coherent, the effect tartly different and original. And yet Enright's deprecating remark makes a point of substance about his first novel, Academic Year (1955). It is not so much that it has to do with travel as with a peculiar consequence of a certain kind of travel, that which makes a man an expatriate. Alexandria, the university, the academic year, the people well off or poor, that is, the place and its life, are seen through the eyes of three expatriates, Brett, a cultural officer destined for success though liable to bring disaster to others, Bacon, the long-serving university teacher, 'a rather unofficial kind of man', and another, younger university teacher, the spiritually youthful Packet. On each of the three the city makes its own impression. Brett sees it as different, sometimes horribly different, in its cruelty, violence, lawlessness, venality; Packet sees what is unique in it and mostly good; Bacon, the failure, the good man ruined, sees what is common or universal in it. Their separate views, wittily and sensitively articulated, together make a wholeness of vision and construct a place complete and human in its life, suffering and comedy.
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