Spirit of place

     Over the last few days I've been reading Deborah Lawrenson's novel Songs of Blue and Gold, and I've taken it slowly to savour it and make the most of it - it's that kind of book. Completely absorbing, beautifully written, psychologically perceptive - that's the broad brushwork of it; the detail is equally fine.
    It is based on the life of Lawrence Durrell, about whom I know a certain amount and several of whose books I've read (most notably The Alexandria Quartet), but it's by no means necessary to be familiar with him to enjoy this. Deborah Lawrenson's character, the poet and writer Julian Adie, was inspired by Durrell's life and work, and her settings are real places in which he lived, but the plot is the writer's own. It concerns Melissa Norden's search for the truth about her mother Elizabeth's involvement with Adie many years earlier on the island of Corfu. Melissa is escaping a turbulent time in her own life, trying to block out the present by researching Elizabeth's history and this hitherto unknown relationship, and as the story moves from Kent to Corfu and rural France, her discoveries unfold to reveal the past and, it seems, a future.
     Julian Adie is compellingly drawn and has all the attraction attributed to Durrell: "The golden aura, the careless manner, his intense interior life, his exuberant insistence on mystery and exploration - it was all a great conjuring trick, one that fascinated her." One of the themes of the book is biography - its challenges and pitfalls, the wrong-turnings based on myth or the straight, hard road of fact and substance, and its use in explaining others' lives with reference to our own, and as such the mix of solid research and informed invention is a highly successful one; it's a very well-balanced book.
     Having read this I want to go back to Durrell himself now, perhaps to read Prospero's Cell his account of life in Corfu, and then to read more by Deborah Lawrenson, so much have I enjoyed my introduction to her.
Meanwhile this excellent novel goes straight onto my books of the year list!

Comments

[Peter the Flautist]

Try also "Bitter Lemons" for an excellent novel of place and a poignant bitter-sweet experience of living in a foreign land.

Dark Puss

[Cheryl]

Reading your post, Karen, brings to mind a topic that I find most challenging in a certain segment of literature...those works which closely describe a certain real-life individual but where the author then digresses into his/her own fictional plot, weaving in and out of real situations but providing their own spin on it. I find it personally very challenging to be able to dissect the real from the fictitious. I get the historical novel genre, a fictional plot set in well known historical events, but those which are more obscure, I find difficult.

Heard of another one yesterday on BBC Radio 4 "American Wife" by Curtis Sittinfeld with a loose account of Laura Bush's life in the White House. Some elements taken from her life but then the author fills in his own anti-Bush slamming. Not that I'm a Bush fan, mind you, but I find it less than honorable somehow? Don't know.

More my own failing, I suppose, in my ability to sort out the differences, but wondered what's your take on those books which are part fact, part fiction?

[Susie Vereker]

I was a great fan of Durrell, especially Bitter Lemons and Esprit de Corps. And the Quartet for that matter, though I'm not sure I'd want to read it again. Sometimes revisiting formerly loved books is like revisiting places where one lived. It isn't the same. @Dark Puss (why does one put @, by the way?). I've just reviewed Life Class by Pat Barker - it has some real characters and real events mixed up with the fictional ones.