The question of literary precedents and influences is a bit trickier with Durrell than it is with other writers who, by virtue of an English university education and a literary career pursued in London, say, seem to stand in a clearer relation to tradition and the mainstream. Durrell is, of course, a born Colonial and a lifelong expatriate who began his literary career with a proclamation of his contempt for the "English death." However, that may be misleading for he is, as he once said, "as English as Shakespeare's birthday."

Indeed the very pattern of his life and work suggests his very English literary forebears, Norman Douglas and D. H. Lawrence. If one says, then, that he is very much an English writer, despite his paradoxical relationship with the place and its traditions, it is necessary to add at once that he is also Irish, French...