Lawrence Durrell: The Black Book

Lawrence Durrell
The Black Book


The Black Book is the novel that gained Lawrence Durrell notice in the literary world.   T. S. Eliot called it "the first piece of work by a new English writer to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction."  Henry Miller worked to get a private edition printed in Paris when Durrell had difficulty finding a publisher.

I find some interesting parallels between The Black Book and the Alexandria Quartet  (AQ).  It's almost as if this was a first attempt which gave him the experience to produce the much larger work, four novels in the Alexandria Quartet, instead of one. 

Both novels are 1st person narratives,  and the narrators of both are now on islands in the Mediterranean, writing of  their experiences of the past year or two.   While the narrator in the AQ writes of his experiences in Alexandria just before WWII, the narrator of The Black Book tells the reader in the past year he has spent in a tired, rundown  hotel in London.  Both narrators struggle as they are in the process of learning their craft.

We don't find out the narrator's name in the AQ until the second novel, Balthazar.  And then, it's only his last name, Darley.  However we do get a clue in the first novel when Darley is told that he's referred to as Lineaments of Gratified Desire.  These are his initials, which coincidentally happen to be the same as the author's: Lawrence George Durrell.   The narrator in The Black Book jokingly refers to himself several times as Lawrence Lucifer. 
 
Those are not the only parallels.   As in the AQ, various forms of love or lust are portrayed in The Black Book, although limited in comparison to the AQ. Another is that at least one other writer is featured prominently in both works.  Journals and diaries also play an important role in both works.  One last commonality is the broken narrative structure in both works wherein the time line is fractured.  Characters are brought into the narrative, and we learn that they are dead or have left before we find out anything about them, including their relationship to the narrator.  It is only later that we learn their significance

Of course, differences exist.  Aside from the size of the two works, one major difference is tone.  The AQ seems to be, to me anyway, a celebration of Alexandria, with all its marvelous characters, its romantic and tragic tales, and its history.  On the other hand, The Black Book is a bitter, biting satire on England between the two world wars.  The narrator refers to "the English death" frequently when speaking of the England of the 1930's.  In the AQ, the golden, if sometimes harsh, light of the sun is an important characteristic of the natural world, while England is usually portrayed as dark, gloomy, and rainy. 

I had first read The Black Book only after reading The Alexandria Quartet, so it is difficult, if not impossible, to judge it on its own merits.  How much of my interest in the work is the result of having read it after The Alexandria Quartet and, therefore, seeing the relationship of this work to the larger work is debatable. I just don't know.  What my feelings toward this work would be if I had read it first is difficult to say right now.