Lawrence Durrell: The Mindscape

In this second volume of his study of the Anglo-Irish novelist Lawrence Durrell (following the appearance in 1988 of The Dandy and the Manners, Mind and Morals from Brummell to Durrell), Richard Pine examines in detail Durrell's unique contribution to the development of the modern novel. He concentrates in particular on the evidence of Durrell's private notebooks and diaries in which his propensity for eastern philosophy underpins his lifelong determination to provide a climax to a lifetime's writing with the creation, in The Avignon Quintet, of what he calls 'a Tibetan novel'. Pine's twenty-year friendship with Durrell has resulted in an intimate portrait of a singular mind whose extraordinary career, both as a writer and as a British colonial official, is hallmarked by the creation of 'the Heraldic Universe', an imaginative realm within which the artist reigns supreme.