Entertaining story of fascinating family

AUTHOR: Michael Haag PUBLISHER: Profile Books, Allen and Unwin RRP: $22.99

REVIEWER: Mary Ann Elliott

IN 1935 Louisa Durrell and her four children, Lawrence, Leslie, Margo and Gerald went to live in Corfu, made famous in Gerald’s much–loved books; My Family and other Animals, Beasts, Birds and Relatives and other volumes of his Corfu trilogy.

Lawrence also wrote beautifully about their island idyll in Prospero’s Cell.

Great storytellers and embroiderers of tales, their sister Margo commented, “I never know what’s fact and what’s fiction in my family”.

Family members have provided the author with letters, reminiscences and many photographs of their lives in England, India and Corfu. The Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust in Jersey was also a basis for this revealing and entertaining family narrative.

Michael Haag’s book traces the remarkable careers of Larry and Gerry, including the realisation of Gerry’s childhood dream; his Zoo in Jersey.

Although English, the children’s earliest memories were of India, travelling its length and breadth with their parents and accompanying their father from one railway engineering project to the next.

India’s forests, scrubland and tea gardens introduced the boys to flora and fauna, which was to become a lifelong passion.

Inspired by the sights and sounds of leopards and tigers, monkeys and parakeets, the scents of coriander and curries and the vivid colours of saris, it was the beginning of their journey.

From a fraught childhood in England, disastrous schooling, “the most ignorant boy in the school”, according to the headmaster, whereupon Gerry never went to school again from age nine), a gin-addicted mother, to a Bohemian existence in London, and finally fame as writers and naturalists, this is a moving and entertaining story of the irrepressibly charming, eccentric but immensely talented Durrell family.

❝ Michael Haag’s book traces the remarkable careers of Larry and Gerry, including the realisation of Gerry’s childhood dream; his Zoo in Jersey.