The Durrells of Corfu

Profile Books 224pp £8.99 The Week Bookshop £6.99

“When I was at boarding school in the 1970s, the Durrells, or at least Gerald, were immensely popular,” said Charlotte Moore in The Spectator. Gerald’s autobiographical novel of 1956, My Family and Other Animals, made us “laugh out loud” with its tales of scorpions skittering across the dining table. Meanwhile, “those of us with intellectual pretensions” tackled Lawrence’s The Alexandria Quartet (1962). In The Durrells of Corfu, Michael Haag focuses on the family’s sojourn on the Greek island in the 1930s, which inspired so much of their subsequent work. While Haag isn’t keen on “dishing dirt”, he does set out to show that the Durrells were “masters of confabulation”, whose written accounts diverged significantly from reality.

Like Elizabeth David, the Durrells “cast a spell” over “sunless” postwar Britain, said Roger Lewis in The Times: readers “lapped up” their descriptions of an “island idyll”. But while Haag’s book is “lively and appreciative”, it does rather break the spell. It emerges, for instance, that Lawrence, already then in his 20s, masterminded the family’s move to Corfu because of concern about his widowed mother’s drinking. Gerald would later describe arriving on Corfu as “like being born for the first time”, when in fact, to begin with, they all “hated” the island. Haag isn’t the first to highlight these half-truths and “elisions”, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. Pointing out where My Family differs from the biographical record is a “time-honoured task” that has been done many times before. Haag would have done better to move on to more “interesting” questions – such as why the Durrells “felt compelled to rewrite their family life so exhaustively”, and how from such an unhappy childhood “emerged two of the leading British writers of the mid-20th century”.