posted on 31 Aug 2020

Birds, Beasts and Relatives by Gerald Durrell

This is the second book in what became Durrell’s Corfu trilogy. It started in glorious fashion with My Family And Other Animals in 1956 and thirteen years later along comes the sequel. If you’re concerned that the intervening years will have led to a substantial change in the direction or atmosphere of the book, you can put all those fears to one side. Effortlessly, Durrell whisks us back to the fecund and sun-drenched world of pre-mass tourism Corfu and reconstructs for us the years of his discovery of the wonders of the natural world – all with the irresistible added curlicues provided by his magnificently eccentric family and the cast of locals who watch over this strange British family with care and occasional consternation.

The fact that Durrell has been able to retain the innocence and brilliance of My Family is perhaps explained by Durrell’s introductory remarks where we learn that what we’re going to get here are a series of episodes and stories that didn’t make it into the first book. Not that they are in any sense less endearing, amusing and fulsome than what went before but simply that there wasn’t room in one book for everything.

You might not, as a result, be too surprised to hear that this approach has both strengths and weaknesses. For the devotees (like me) of the first book, slipping back in to the slightly loopy world of the ex-patriot Durrells is both welcome and reassuring. But the downside of this approach is that the book has a much more episodic character that we encountered in My Family. In the first book Gerald’s discovery of nature, the island of Corfu and his growing appreciation of the local population all worked to provide a sort of single, cohesive framework. Here, however, each episode feels as if it’s really a short story in its own right and overall the book only has cohesion by reference back to the first.

The pervading feel of an exotic never-ending summer of childhood that Durrell created in My Family doesn’t quite, for me at least, sustain itself as we move from chapter to chapter in the sequel. There is a distinct feeling that in the thirteen years between the books Durrell has been working on and polishing each episode as if it were a short story in its own right and deserving of its own particular atmosphere.

I know this feels like – and probably is – a somewhat carping kind of criticism and it’s certainly not something that will prevent a Durrell fan from finding things in here that will make you hoot with laughter and which will also make you want to explore the natural world with a new sense of wonder. But I also found myself having a lot more sympathy with Larry and Leslie as they watch with a sort of irritable wonder as Gerald covertly attempts to fill their villa with all manner of creepy crawlies and malodorous fauna. And he doesn’t confine himself to the small fry – his indulgent family buy him a donkey for his birthday which sets up one of the funniest set pieces in the book when the beast takes umbrage with Larry and kicks him full square in the stomach.

The third book in the trilogy is The Garden of the Gods, which I haven’t read and, to be honest, I’m not sure I’ll be rushing to do so. Two volumes of this glimpse into a past idyll is enough for me - for the time being at least - but there will be plenty of other people who will probably want as much of this as they can get. Finding both paper and hardback copies isn’t difficult and you’ll pay very little for them.

 

Terry Potter

August 2020