The one genre of writing in which Durrell … has not achieved either popular or critical success, is the verse play…. Though full of beautiful passages of lyrical and meditative verse, [Sappho, his first play in this genre,] perhaps lacks the tensions and confrontations that are proper to drama; it is more like a versification of one of Landor's Imaginary Conversations. In his next verse play, Acte, Durrell took this lesson to heart, and it is a melodrama in the style of Corneille, about...

Durrell's "ideas" are in some ways the most dubious thing about him. They are seldom original or persuasive; they suggest, rather, a combination of half-digested gobbets of wisdom heavily seasoned with personal idiosyncrasy, or just plain whimsy. The same recipe provides most of the fare in A Smile in the Mind's Eye, a short account of Durrell's re-education in the disciplines of the Tao through the effect of two close personal relationships. One of these was with a Chines...

Laurence Durrell has used the word 'quincunx' to describe his plan of five novels, of which [Constance] is the third. 'Quincunx' means the arrangement of five objects in such a way that four of them are at the corners of a square or rectangle and one is in the centre; but whether Constance, one of its two predecessors (Monsieur and Livia) or one of its projected successors is to be regarded as the central work, is not clear. At all events, a prior reading of the first two volumes...

Lawrence Durrell refers to his current project of five interconnected novels—of which Constance is the third and latest—as a "quincunx." He might more aptly call it the Avignon Quintet. The fact that he has avoided doing so, and thereby forestalled associations with the Alexandria Quartet, seems significant. The Alexandria Quartet is arguably his finest work, and certainly his most popular. With its labyrinthine twists of plot, its unexpected facets catching light from constantly...

[A Smile in the Mind's Eye] must have been fun to write. Can it also be said to be fun to read? It is supposed to be for the Lawrence (George) Durrell 1912– Photograph by Mark Gersonsmile of the title is partly the sign of an amused and detached attitude to life, while the 'mind's eye' suggests not only the images of memory, but the unity of mind and body, without which there can be no pleasure or enjoyment...

Constance or Solitary Practices is a treasury of observations, the third in a planned series of five novels, set one inside the other like a set of Russian dolls. Each can be read independently, but the faithful reader who has followed the game step by step is rewarded by new-born images reflected in the other mirror-novels, each vaster in scope than the previous one, each acting on the others like a dream within a dream. Constance is the log-book of a poet. Our times have not been kind to poets who venture...

[Among the English novelists who] have continually raised the stakes of a purely artistic ambition, Lawrence Durrell holds a secure and honourable place. The dedication of Constance, or Solitary Practices to 'Anais' and 'Henry' (and indeed to 'Joey') indicates the cosmopolitan range of his affiliations. Its last chapter, 'The City's Fall', evokes a dialogue with historiography which has become ever more explicit. The great French historian, Fern...

Some great novelists have also been great or at least very good poets. Scott, Hardy, Meredith, D. H. Lawrence spring immediately to mind. Other novelists, like Dickens or E. M. Forster, scarcely attempted to write poetry at all—that is, if we discount the often intensely purple passages in their prose. Finally, a few novelists have tried to write poetry but have succeeded only incompletely or intermittently. It is to this last category that Lawrence Durrell must be assigned. Durrell's reputati...

Livia: Or Buried Alive is the second in a "quincunx" of novels that [Durrell] began with Monsieur several years ago and that promises to become a tour de force rivaling The Alexandria Quartet. Concerned about fiction, particularly the novel, in a post-Einsteinian, post-Freudian age, Durrell makes a novelist a major character in his novels, someone writing about other characters who know what he is doing and who reflect, as the novelist does, upon what he has written. At times all this becomes ...

I have sometimes thought that Durrell is the last of the Georgian poets, that it may be a short step from Shropshire to Rhodes or Vaumort. His is no "weekend ruralism," but has always been a kind of delicate passion for the "natural." Most readers think of him as either a satirist or a love poet. He is actually to one side of either category. The droll imperatives of sex and conscience animate his poems—England at the end of its tether, tried to the Mediterranean pleasure ...

Five years ago Lawrence Durrell announced in his envoi to "Monsieur" that it was to be the first novel in a quincunx—"five novels only dependent on one another as echoes might be." There he begat an alter ego, Blanford, with whom he shared the authorship of "Monsieur"; and Blanford begat another writer, Sutcliffe, whose commonplace book full of uncommonplace and conflicting thoughts supplies a sort of preposterously punning Greek chorus to the present volume ...

Over the years Durrell's mania for islands has spawned the pastoral optimism of his Corfu idyll, Prospero's Cell, pessimistic resignation in his portrait of Rhodes, Reflections on a Marine Venus, and an abject disillusion that dominates his Cypriot chronicle, Bitter Lemons. Now he has selected from his experiences of all the Greek islands…. [On] the evidence of the text alone 'islomania', rather than overwhelming its victim in his old age, weakens and ages along with him. ...

Style, writes Proust, is in no way an embellishment … it is not even a question of technique; it is like colour with certain paintings, a revelation of a private universe which each one of us sees and which is not seen by others. The pleasure an artist gives is to make us know an additional universe. This is handy for the heightened realities of Livia, successor to Monsieur, 'written in a highly eliptical quincunxial style invented for the occasion', set largely in the ominous late �...

Mr Durrell's narrative [in Livia] is never impeded by qualms about verisimilitude. Nor is it arranged into much shape. There are a few hieratic gestures intended to suggest that profoundly meaningful patterns are being unrolled. Durrell is writing about Blanford who is writing about Sutcliffe who is writing about…. And dark, devilish Livia is set against fair, wholesome Constance—her sister who goes to Vienna, not Munich; admires Freud, not Hitler; and, when war breaks out, heads for th...