fireworks

"The writing wanders off and explodes in amateur surrealist fireworks, and when it returns, the pattern of the characters has changed again."

Kenneth Rexroth over Lawrence Durrell’s “Black Book”

This early novel was written when Durrell was 24 and was, "a two-fisted attack on literature by an angry young man of the thirties". Its points of interest today are mainly two. First, as pointed out, is the contrast between today's "angries" and one of the '30's. Second, and most important, is that we see here the genesis of many elements of theme and style which have made his Alexandria Quartet (Justine, etc.) so widely hailed. Here they are presented in a crude, undisciplined, violent, and quite soon hypnotically boring form. The story- if it can be called that at all- deals with an assorted group of people living in a dreary London hotel: a homosexual; a Peruvian lecher, a D. H. Lawrencian, a gigolo, several prostitutes, the narrator, and, in absentia, the author of a diary left behind in the narrator's room. The themes are loneliness, egoism, the varieties of sex, love, and hate, death, isolation, escape, decay, and "the English Death", the conventional cultural trappings of the time.