The Corfu Trilogy
Dappling light and phosphorescence
My Family and Other Animals; Birds Beasts, and Relatives; and The Garden of the Gods by Gerald Durrell
Gerald Durrell’s recollections of his childhood are not accurate. He makes mistakes. He says that people who were there were not there, that people who were not there made appearances. He gets his dates — the few he mentions — hopelessly confused.
Was Corfu before the Second World War really like this for an expatriate English family? Filled with locals who are charmingly eccentric and no other people from Britain, filled with bizarre local customs and escaped convicts and people who regularly talk with predicable idiosyncrasy and perfect comic timing? It is unlikely.
Such is the fate of memoirs of childhood. It’s a hazy time, both very close at hand but also extremely far away. Of course you make errors if you try to recollect. Of course, things that seemed important at the time, they turn out many years later not to be important at all. And of course you got the wrong end of the stick often, many times, as you learn yourself what life is like, what is acceptable and expected. And so Durrell’s books are full of what tedious people would call over-elaboration, errors of fact. But this does not matter.
They don’t matter because what Durrell is really doing is not so much attempting to put on record a time, a historical series of events, but instead to memorialise a feeling. The feeling of being very young, of not knowing yet that life is a tragedy, of going out into a world that is comfortably familiar but endlessly strange, of falling into deep affinity and affection for things like spiders crawling atop and through an old wall whose mortar has failed. Watching local men illegally throwing dynamite into the harbour to try to get a good catch.
And watching the light fall, dappled, through the olive groves, waking with the hot morning sun already on your face, and seeing locals sailing about the island in the dark dusk, with lanterns affixed over the sides of their boats, and the phosphorous effects of the nighttime and the fish and the algae having their patterns interrupted by the interjection of keels and oars.
It is a partial tale, the story of a boy who was the centre of his own vast world, for whom other people seem to be stock characters — they might be close and they might be loved, but all are rich material. Theo, the scholar, one of the few great men of the book. And Spiro the taxi driver.
Stories of strange friends of your brother’s coming around and behaving absurdly. Of tutors of yours — deeply strange and wounded people — and their affectations. Of odd people who might in another light have seemed threatening, even evil, but who to you are not dangerous so long as you cooperate and help them as they like and do not rat them out when they do what society might not necessarily condone.
These books have been enormously successful and there is no mystery in that. They are written with meticulous care and detail. With every story about, for example, collecting little birds and hedgehogs and insects, or finding and studying minutely a scorpion in its adopted home, approaches a level of almost documentary realism. So closely does Durrell describe animal behaviour, habitat, and its reaction to arriving in the specimen bottle, the glass case, the young naturalist’s bag.
While the stories of chaos — of the animals escaping captivity, of family falling into boggy holes while shooting, of the tutor, deeply frustrated, who flushes deep scarlet whenever he may talk about A Lady for whom he claims he did some kindness, and who fires rifles from his window periodically to dispatch some of the island’s strays, whom he cannot bear to see suffer — are played for the broadest, the most enthusiastic laughs.
No wonder they sold so well. No wonder they are so loved.