THE DURRELLS

Portrait of a dysfunctional bunch.

Bradford’s biography refers to the eponymous family most familiar to Americans for the bestselling book and subsequent TV series, My Family and Other Animals. Set on 1930s Corfu, it offers a cozy portrait of an eccentric family through the eyes of a 13-year-old boy in love with zoology. No animal, snail, or bug, however, crawling from beneath a slimy rock, can match the repugnance of the family as depicted by Bradford. Originally from colonial India, the family struggles with the modern, egalitarian world. The mother, Louisa, was placed in mental institutions when not retiring to her bed with a bottle of gin. Leslie, the middle brother, became a farmer in Kenya before skipping the country after embezzling money from fellow settlers. He died alone, in dismal circumstances, having no contact with his two writer siblings. The bulk of the biography concerns Lawrence Durrell, best known for The Alexandria Quartet. He was once considered a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Bradford faults the writer for his modernist pretensions and self-aggrandizement. Bradford portrays the author as a spoiled, alcoholic wife beater, whose daughter hanged herself because of his sexual predations. Gerald, the more popular author, worked to promote a more enlightened view of animal rights. His wildlife trust, funding a zoo on the island of Jersey, was opened by David Attenborough, but the trust almost bankrupted Durrell. This book’s thesis is that Gerald’s invention of the perfect paradise on Corfu was a complete fiction and that, for all of their cosmopolitan travels, the family was both apolitical and self-obsessed. Alongside Lawrence’s dabblings in British intelligence in Egypt and later Argentina, there always seems to be a scotch to be started or a marriage to be ended. No wonder, perhaps, that Gerald found animals more pleasant than people. They didn’t write books about you, nor count the bottles.

More than you wanted to know about a famous literary family.